Missing From the War

The New York Times looks at many reasons for the reduction of media coverage of the war in Iraq but overlooks a key one: corporate decisions to cut foreign staff in favor of hyper-local coverage and to depend almost entirely on "the wires" for non-local news. Of course, at the Times, that cutback and refocusing may not be so apparent. Also, the Times misspells Mathew Brady's name but other than that, it's a pretty good piece.

Not to See the Fallen Is No Favor
By DAVID CARR
On this Memorial Day, thousands of United States men and women are engaged in untold acts of bravery and drudgery on behalf of what our leaders have defined as vital American interests in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But even as the flags wave to honor soldiers past, much of the current campaigns go on without notice, because while troop numbers are surging, the media that cover them are leaking away, worn out by the danger and expense of covering a war that refuses to end.

ACES Scholarships and Books

If you're interested in helping out the ACES scholarship fund but

Don't have money to spare
Do have more good books than you need

please let me know.

We've tested online sales through a bookstore in Oregon and it works well; you type in the book's ISBN, accept or reject the price offered and, when you're done listing, the store provides a pre-paid shipping label via e-mail or URL. You entail zero costs and the listing and packing process takes just a few minutes. It's extremely simple and reliable to use.

Alone, we are unlikely to raise a huge pot of money but together, I think we could make enough to help fund a scholarship or two.

Note that the store has high standards and, like most bookstores, offers very low prices*. But if you or your newsroom colleagues have been hoarding quality books, including textbooks, and want to spend a few minutes helping a good cause, send an e-mail and we could get you started.


*This is what we raised in our first test shipment last week.

Number of titles: 13
Total quantity: 13

ISBN: 0393058670
Title: Almost Human: Making Robots Think
Author: Lee Gutkind
Each: $4.90


ISBN: 0743257359
Title: China, Inc.: How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges
America and the World
Author: Ted C. Fishman
Each: $1.83


ISBN: 0891061983
Title: Co-Active Coaching, 2nd Edition: New Skills for Coaching People
Toward Success in Work and, Life
Author: Laura Whitworth, Karen Kimsey-House, Henry Kimsey-House,
Phillip Sandahl
Each: $9.19


ISBN: 0195325273
Title: Institutions of American Democracy: A Republic Divided
(Institutions of American Democracy)
Author: Annenberg Democracy Project
Each: $0.50


ISBN: 0393320669
Title: Riches for the Poor: The Clemente Course in the Humanities
Author: Earl Shorris
Each: $1.51


ISBN: 0764201735
Title: Roll Away Your Stone: Living in the Power of the Risen Christ
Author: Dutch Sheets
Each: $3.07


ISBN: 141694074X
Title: The Corporate Dominatrix: Six Roles to Play to Get Your Way at
Work
Author: Lisa Robyn
Each: $3.36


ISBN: 019531588X
Title: The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (Oxford
History of the United States)
Author: Robert Middlekauff
Each: $3.90


ISBN: 019531199X
Title: The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of
Silicon Valley
Author: Leslie Berlin
Each: $1.28


ISBN: 0399154116
Title: The Personality Code
Author: Travis Bradberry
Each: $4.30


ISBN: 1842931407
Title: The Secret Founding of America: The Real Story of Freemasons,
Puritans, & the Battle for The New World
Author: Nicholas Hagger
Each: $4.32


ISBN: 0691102961
Title: The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and
Our Future
Author: Richard B. Alley
Each: $3.77


ISBN: 1599471124
Title: Unexpected Grace: Stories of Faith, Science, and Altruism
Author: Bill Kramer
Each: $3.38

Grand Total: $45.31

Another on Jobs

I've gotten calls from papers in two cities, looking to hire copy editors. If you want to know more, please e-mail.

Job Posting

If you are looking for work and don't mind moving, here's an interesting possibility from the International Federation of Journalists:

IFJ Job Opportunities

Appointment of Deputy General Secretary

The International Federation of Journalists invites applications for the position of Deputy General Secretary (Administration). This is a full time post based at the Federation’s headquarters in Brussels. The IFJ Executive Committee has agreed the following job description:

The Deputy General Secretary will be responsible to the General Secretary for

1. oversight of all administrative affairs, including staff matters, covering the work of the Brussels secretariat and regional offices;
2. supervision of finances and monitoring of IFJ contracts and legal obligations;
3. relations with regional offices;
4. relations with member unions and statutory bodies of the IFJ in the absence of the General Secretary;
5. such other duties and activities that the General Secretary shall from time to time decide.

The appointment of the Deputy General Secretary will be made by the General Secretary on the basis of recommendation from an appointments panel to consist of the President and one other member of the Administrative Committee, the General Secretary, and a member of staff.

The vacancy will be advertised through IFJ unions, the international trade union movement and the Brussels international community. The IFJ is an equal opportunities employer.

Fluency in English and another working language of the IFJ (French or Spanish) is highly desirable as is knowledge of working in journalism or a trade union environment.

The position has been declared vacant by the IFJ Executive Committee meeting in Dubrovnik on March 3rd 2007. Applications are sought with a closing date of June 30th 2007. Interviews will take place during July 2007.

All applications, with full curriculum vitae and references should be sent to
the General Secretary
International Federation of Journalists
International Press Centre
Résidence Palace, Block C
155 Rue De La Loi
B1040 Brussels

Tel: +32 2 235 2200
Fax: +32 2 235 2219
E-mail: ifj@ifj.org

Outsourced Editors

Protest at awards night
APN outsourcing about "effficiency"

New Zealand's top newspaper journalists were honoured in Wellington on Saturday night at the Qantas awards but the glitzy ceremony was disrupted by a protest against changes in the newspaper industry.

The evening is a showcase for the written word but the journalists took the stage to protest moves by APN, owners of the New Zealand Herald, to contract out subediting jobs like headline writing and layout to an Australian company.

"This centralisation of sub-editing is going to reduce excellence - make it much harder to produce good stories - because we're going to be separating the people who write them from those with the institutional knowledge of what's gone on in the past," says union delegate Simon Collins.

The move also affects regional papers like the Bay of Plenty Times and Rotorua's Daily Post.

APN says there will be 70 jobs affected by their decision to outsource sub-editing and the vast bulk of those will be in Auckland.

APN has previously said the change will mean more efficient production but readers can judge next month when the first pages under the new system roll off the presses.

The protesting journalists are not worried about repercussions.

"This is a democracy," says Collins.

Check Quotes Before Printing

The New York Times corrects an Obama story typo

Making and Covering the News

Will Bunch raises a good point about the continuing blurring of lines between newsmakers and news reporters, this time at the White House white-tie dinner for Queen Elizabeth II.

CNN: Hire More Editors

From CNN International

Tip to mediabistro.

Howie Strikes Again

This is going to meander a bit so bear with me, or not. Your call.

The New York Times ran a story Wednesday about a course at Stony Brook University that is designed to teach people how to judge news.

This is a wonderful idea, timely as we drown in an information flood of newspaper stories, online and in print, TV news, commentary, blogs, forums and more. Underlying the premise of the course run by Howard Schneider, former editor of Newsday, is that people use news more than they realize and need to be better educated, more critical readers, or just better readers, to understand what is going on in the world.

It's not wise to be trapped in one or two ways of finding information. We need to be open to all kinds of information without giving up our franchise of good reporting leading to well-produced stories that inform people otherwise too busy to find things out entirely by themselves.

Let's start with blogs. I'm a big fan of them. Or rather, some of them. Because to say that I like blogs is like saying I like newspapers but make no distinction between the Washington Times and the Wall Street Journal (as presently constituted.)

Let me restate: there are a number of excellent news and commentary blogs that are worth reading. Just this morning, as I'm watching the Gonzales hearing, The Washington Post gets getting credit for a story about a ninth fired U.S. attorney. But I read about this attorney first, and days ago, at Talking Points Memo. Just as I read more and better explanations of economic matters and documented problems with projections and promises about withdrawal dates and progress reports in Iraq at Eschaton.

But in just the last few days, I've seen one of my favorite folks, Sree Sreenivasan, get banged around on some of my favorite blogs because part of what he is quoted as saying in the Chicago Sun-Times rubbed some people the wrong way and the piling-on began. It reminds me of that "never let the facts get in the way of a school story" comment we mockingly use in newsrooms. Utterly aside from whether he was quoted accurately, it's pretty clear he was saying one thing that, out of context, sounded like something else.

At the same time, some of these very same blogs have been at the forefront of challenging administration misstatements and keeping print reporters honest. Let me note that to confuse drive-by comments, of unknown origin, with what the blogger has written is as bad as confusing the content of letters written by the local gadfly to the editor with that of a staff columnist. It ain't the same, and we should differentiate in how we refer to them. ( Just as we ought to distinguish between "Christian" leaders and rightwing/evangelical or other specific terms when we're reporting on religious-political matters. But that's another discussion for another day.)

Then there's TV. If I were running The Washington Post, I wouldn't let another reporter go on "Hardball," at least not since Chris Matthews attacked a Post reporter as a "liberal" and challenged her on that basis. We've got a former political operative--who fawned all over George Bush in his flight suit--who won't let anyone else talk attacking an objective reporter. What's wrong with that? Everything.

What this NYT story tells me is
a) We may get smarter readers out of a class like this, one that teaches people how to think about what they're reading and not simply slap liberal or conservative labels on stories, to recognize opinion masquerading as fact and maybe, just maybe, value genuine reporting.
b) We're going to have to do better in print, not cede ground to everyone who complains but not relinquish our true role in order to have friends, of any political persuasion.

Here's part of that NYT story. Telling Bogus From True: A Class in Reading News

.....It was one small moment in the course on news literacy, a semester-long lesson on how to be an informed consumer of news, how to navigate with appropriate skepticism the ever more crowded — and confusing — spheres of print, broadcast and Internet journalism. The course is unusual in that it is aimed at all students, not just aspiring journalists.

Newspapers on the Big Screen

Ana Estela de Sousa Pinto asked the newscoach forum to provide names of favorite newspaper movies. Rene Kaluza compiled the list from responses.

Links go to IMDB or epinions' reviews.

-30- aka Deadline Midnightt
A Case of Libel
Absence of Malice
Ace in the Hole
All the President's Men
Blessed Event
Blood Diamonds
Broadcast News
Capote
Citizen Kane
Continental Divide
Deadline USA
Fletch
Fletch Lives
Capturing the Friedmans
Foreign Correspondent
Good Night and Good Luck
His Girl Friday
I Love Trouble
Inherit the Wind
Live from Baghdad
Meet John Doe
Network
Northside 777
Nothing Sacred
Salvador
Shattered Glass
Switching Channels
Teacher's Pet
The China Syndrome
The Insider
The Killing Fields
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
The Paper
The Pelican Brief
The Quiet American
The Shipping News
The Year of Living Dangerously
True Crime
Under Fire
Up Close and Personal
Winchell
Woman of the Year

I'd add, "Somewhere I'll Find You," a 1942 film featuring Clark Gable as a war correspondent, who as the film ends, is dictating his battle story and he repeats the line, "More To Come!" as a warning to the Japanese. The story he dictates is pretty moving, rather Ernie Pyle-like in style. Lots better than many of today's boilerplate "all soldiers are heroes" even though the underlying theme is the same.

A couple of others:
Parallax View
The Finger Points

A little more removed from journalism, "Penny Serenade."

And the previously mentioned 1929 "Copy."

Any others?

Paging Nancy Grace. (Kill Me Now)

Over at Monkeyfilter, there's an interesting debate about why a particularly grisly rape/double-murder case in Tennessee hasn't received national attention.

I don't necessarily agree with all the comments, or certainly the original posting on the snopes page, but still, worth a look to see what people think of the media. I'm warning you: the details of the crime are awful. The question, though, does get at the matter of how certain crimes go national and others do not.

The Long and the Long of It

Roy Peter Clark advises us not to fear a long sentence but I don't think he had this sentence in mind, which, remarkably, makes a lot of sense despite the length:

On the fourth anniversary of the staging of the "Mission Accomplished" scene on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, some 49 months after President George W. Bush taunted the Iraqi insurgents to "bring 'em on" against our troops, the swaggering Texan hurried up from Florida Tuesday, where back on Sept. 11, 2001, an aide whispering about a second jet plane slamming into the World Trade Center froze him doggedly on schedule to read "The Pet Goat" to third graders blessed to have been born in the Sunshine State presided over by another scion of the Bush family, one Jeb, who, with the U.S. Supreme Court concurring, helped override the intention of voters and get his older brother into the White House, along with a GOP-dominated Congress such a rubber-stamp in its impressions that the chief executive would resort to the veto only once in six years, and this to halt embryonic stem-cell research, a veto so traumatizing for his party-ruled 109th Congress that it relapsed into somnolence of the sort that had imbued the 43rd president, post 9/11, with an almost regal authority that he misspent on an ill-begotten war making instant billionaires of war profiteers and oil tycoons, while wasting the nation's treasury, reputation and honor at a rate so dizzying that in November '06 the voters diverted their attention and remote controls to drop just enough levers over the names of Democrats to short-circuit the electoral chicanery of Karl Rove, a bold move that ushered in the 110th Congress with the sentiment, if not the mandate, to wind down the Iraq war, that troubling ordeal underwritten by the deaths of at least 3,358 U.S. soldiers and 770 civilian contractors, with more than 25,000 injured, all caught up in the execution of Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney's trillion-dollar invasion, which has inflicted an estimated 600,000 Iraqi deaths in a war without a blueprint for peace or an achievable victory, save for the mumblings of a five-time military-draft-avoiding Cheney, whose former Halliburton Corp. is eager to continue pocketing astronomical profits from a taxpayer-supported Iraq war without the wind-down the Congress voted into the $124-billion war-funding measure that landed on the president's desk last week, interrupting his huddle with generals in the state his brother no longer governs, thanks to the forces of good, and forcing Bush to make his Air Force One way back to the White House to cast the historic second veto of his two terms.