Focusing on Content

There was a little tempest on cable TV (where else) over a headline that accompanied Treasury Secretary Timothy Geitner's op-ed piece in The New York Times.

The headline "Welcome to the Recovery" was read as snark by many and a number of reporters (who should at least get the name right) rushed to defend Geithner's work against sarcastic comments on the "title."

I've always thought headline writers could have more fun by writing heads that commented on the stories rather than simply tried to relay information contained in the story.

This site, though, has taken on book titles, and suggests ways to make them better.

Another Fake Memo

Coming just a few days after an apparently fake memo about the Democrats and the healthcare reform bill made its way onto several major websites, including Politico, another bogus email  fooled some more news organizations today.

So is anyone checking anything or is the rush to have stories first  trumping commonsense and responsibility to readers? AKA good journalism.

From TPM:

Medea Benjamin of Code Pink tells TPMmuckraker that the left-wing activist group orchestrated the bogus AIPAC press release calling for a settlement freeze that got picked up by several major news organizations today.

Benjamin says she and a colleague stood outside the AIPAC conference hall today dressed in suits and handed out copies of the statement to confused attendees.

Not a Newspaper. That's for Sure. UPDATED

Yeah. Like, who gives a crap about whether it's true, right? Because after all, we'd rather read garbage and rumors than fact. Denton should be embarrassed to have written and circulated this memo. But he's probably not.

From the Awl, a memo from Nick Denton to Gawker staffers.

From: Nick Denton
Date: Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 6:33 PM
Subject: We're not running a newspaper
A few cases recently where we've thought *way* too much before publishing. Even when we've had exclusive information or even documentary evidence.
There's always a good argument for waiting. Let's check to see whether the associated claim is true; oh, the source might be exposed.
But we should publish anyway, making clear what we know to be true and what remains up in the air. Or even just publish a headline or quicklink and fill the story in later. We can always update. We can always write a second post when we've established more of the facts.
We've brought in some of the better traditions of newspapers. We're breaking more stories than we ever have. That's awesome.
But there's no way we're going to slow our publishing schedule to that of a ponderous newspaper-style organization — where everything has to go through layers of edit and approval and checking and legal. If we did that, we'd be neither as authoritative as a newspaper nor as nimble as the smaller blogs that *do* indeed publish as soon as they get something.
At some media organizations you might get rapped for running a premature story. At Gawker Media, you'll lose way more points for being scooped on a story you had in your hands.
Nick

  A little update, because this memo is so disturbing. I did a little legal work a couple of years ago, preparing to serve as a defense witness in a libel case. Had it gone to trial, the suit would have turned on accuracy and whether the paper had done the utmost to report and verify the facts, and had stuck to good journalistic practices. And as a copy chief at one point in my career, during which the city desk never met a deadline it couldn't blow, I would occasionally yell out to the rim as time ran out, "If it ain't libel, send it." But, you see, that was the one unbreachable barrier--libel. You simply cannot tell your staff to skip the well-established editing process AND the lawyers and think that that won't blow up in your face someday. I await the first legal test of this foolish memo's premise.

2nd Update Copy Editors, Pay Attention

Update No.2: Over at Poynter, there's a good discussion going about the former Knight Ridder plan to consolidate desks. Not surprisingly, David Sullivan weighs in with lots of good information, including some questions the folks in Philadelphia had raised.

And ACES comments on its web site.

UPDATED: John McIntyre wrote a response this morning to Lodovic's bright idea, below, and then our friend Forrest Brown added his two cents. Both worthy of your attention.

The always-smart Tim McGuire catches MediaNews president Joseph Lodovic saying something really foolish:

``We have to find ways to grow revenue or become more efficient by eliminating fixed costs,'' Lodovic said. ``Why does every newspaper need copy editors? In this day and age, I think copy-editing can be done centrally for several newspapers.''

Well, where shall we begin? Because we could fill a blog every day with mistakes we see in unedited copy posted to the web? That our reputation as a profession and an industry rests on accuracy? That anyone familiar with a community knows if their local newspaper staff isn't? We know this to be true. Why doesn't an industry executive?

I try to avoid badmouthing people on this blog but this is really foolish. Not shocking as in, who could have seen that coming, but astounding all the same. How much of this idea is rooted in the shortage of copy editors? Or demands for pay parity with reporters? In copy editors' refusal to close their eyes to weak, badly written, poorly sourced stories?

We talked vaguely about this possibility back when we were first forming ACES--what was the logical outcome of the shortage of copy editors? Some thought it was time to demand more money and some succeeded, apparently. Others thought it was time for copy desks to assert their role in the newsroom and, presumably, some did. Others experienced some foreboding, some fear that this plan for regionalizing desks to save money might be the next step.

As MediaNews makes clear, there's no other reason. It's a way of producing carbon copy newspapers, by people unfamiliar with an area.

This is the same kind of thinking that leads us to write endlessly about untalented, self-destructive Hollywood types as if they mattered, thus making ourselves irrelevant to readers. It's the same kind of thinking that allows, even forces, talent and decades of institutional memory out the door and then brags that the loss of dozens, even hundreds, of people won't harm coverage. Or allows the bigmouths of cable "news" to substitute uninformed opinion for reporting, over and over.

This is our leadership? This is our future? Certainly we can and must do better than this.