Trib Reporter “finally got through after being on hold for 50 minutes”

The Chicago Tribune published an article today describing the trials its reporters faced in traveling through a snowstorm to cover an ugly football game. The detail!

Brad Biggs: Biggs worked to get out a day early. Calls to the carrier were unsuccessful….He  found room on a United flight at 3:55 p.m. Friday that got him to Baltimore before the storm.

Brian Cassella: Cassella rebooked for a flight first thing Sunday. He was one of many trying to get on that United flight, as there were 88 names on the standby list when he boarded.

David Haugh: Haugh had his original flight canceled and rebooked later Saturday night — only to have that one canceled too. So he took a circuitous route to Baltimore. His 5:56 a.m. US Airways flight from Chicago connected in Charlotte, N.C. After a 70-minute layover there, he arrived in Baltimore.

Vaughn McClure: He initially was to leave Chicago at 11:35 a.m. Saturday, but his flight was rescheduled for 7:30 p.m, and eventually canceled…. Thanks to the help of customer relations representative LaMarkus Jones, McClure made an earlier United flight and arrived with four hours to spare.

Dan Pompei: Pompei spent an hour trying to get in contact with an airline representative with no luck. He tried again a couple of hours later and finally got through after being on hold for 50 minutes.

Coverage of baseball’s winter meetings and the future of journalism

I hesitate to use a beat as trivial as baseball as an indicator of other, more important, kinds of journalism, but here goes:

As MLB’s winter meetings begin, baseball geeks are chattering about possible deals and analyzing the personnel moves that are made. Let’s compare where they might go for winter meeting coverage. If you’re a baseball fan, where would you spend more time?

• In Chicago, fans might go check out Phil Roger’s “MLB Whispers.” Rogers has 8 sentences with 6 nuggets of news and conjecture. (Roger’s 225 word piece has 7 hyperlinks, seemingly sprinkled in at random, to the Tribune archives. One is to the article itself, another to a two-year old news item.)
• MLB Trade Rumors (Chicago-based, coincidentally)had 14 posts on Saturday, more than 3,000 words. The most recent entry has 9 news items and about a dozen links to articles outside of its site. MLBTR tracks, and links to, reports from across the web and Twitter. Each post is tagged with relevant players and teams; side-bars send readers to lists of top available players, player rankings, and a summary of the ‘oos best trades.

I’ve thought about MLBTR during the spate of Murdoch-inspired debates over the future of newspaper payrolls. The conundrum: focussed aggregators like MLBTR are better sources of information than the individual news organizations they use on sources. On the other, they drive traffic to those sites; traffic that most, at least the newspapers, say they can’t turn into revenue. (ESPN, with its subscription-based Insider service, never seems to complain.) MLBTR wouldn’t exist without the Phil Rogers of the world– though I expect that many paid journalists, particularly those working for smaller newspapers– use the site themselves for information.

But what’s preventing the Tribunes of the world from starting, or buying, their own MLBTRs– or at least integrating some of the most basic of web tools– such as hyperlinking to outside sites, building relevant sidebars, and tagging?

[My favorite analyses of Murdoch's "off the grid" proposal from last month came from Nick Carr and Umair Haque.

Carr:

Murdoch’s suggestion that he’ll pull News Corp content out of Google’s database could turn out to be a brilliant signaling strategy, one that could alter the balance of power on the Net….There are signs that the signal is working. Bloomberg reports today that the publishers of the Denver Post and the Dallas Morning News are now considering blocking Google in one way or another. Faced with a large-scale loss of professional news stories from its search engine, Google would likely have little choice but to begin paying sites to index their content. That would be a nightmare scenario for Google – and a dream come true for newspapers and other big content producers.

Haque:

If Murdoch “wins,” society is worse off. Readers lose, because choice in news is limited, and prices inevitably jacked up, without better news having been created…. the challenge for newspapers is scarcity — real scarcity, not artificial. Can newspapers offer distinctive perspectives, rich with knowledge, expanded into topics, that make readers authentically better off? That’s what scarce, distinctive news might look like.

Mapping LA

I began the week annoyed by practices of some newspaper websites, but I’m ending it with praise for the LA Times efforts to involve residents in an effort  map the county.

Readers have commented on 86 of the 87 neighborhoods we proposed, the one exception being Griffith Park, which has thousands of visitors daily but few homes. Many of the comments offered specific advice, or criticism. Some gave vivid remembrances of places where the reader grew up or once lived. Others disputed the name we had given an area as too narrow or, in some cases, too unknown….The purpose of the finished map is twofold: We plan to use it as The Times standard for defining where events take place within the city. It will also become the basis, along with maps of the the rest of the county and region, for interactive projects in the works.

In praise of journalistic legends

I spent Thursday in the company of giants in the field of journalism at Columbia University’s conference on Watchdog Journalism. (Some Columbia Journalism students and recent grads blogged today’s sessions; Twitter coverage here.)

In responding to one of my twitter reports, Dan O’Neil pointed me to a piece he wrote last year that articulates some of the thoughts  that rattled around my head today as listened to courageous journalists from around the world:

It’s good for me to take a break from whining about this or that city official not calling me back, or some municipal department that turned down my Freedom of Information Act request, or some agency that provides partial data rather than every field I requested. I’ve got it made. For some, it really is life or death, captivity of freedom, torture or awards. And there are legends of this business that still live and breathe. Let’s try to keep them free, and appreciated, and keep working as hard as we can, wherever we are.

A Monday kvetch about newspaper websites

There are better places to read about what’s wrong with newspapers’ websites, so I’ll be brief:

• Why is the New York Times hiding the audio of its interview with President Obama? Hearing it talked up on MSNBC and NPR, I headed to the Times site to load it onto the iPod for my morning run.  There is no mention of Saturday’s interview on the home page; after some digging, I find an article about, and transcript of, the interview, but when I dig around long enough to find a summary and transcript of the interview, I only find excerpts of audio.
• Why can’t the Chicago Tribune learn to link correctly? This article about airfare price cuts (which oddly isn’t listed on its Travel page) mentions travel sites like BestFares.com and Vayama.com without including links; a mention of The Travel Team Inc includes an apparently auto-generated link to a seemingly irrelevant Tribune page. This would have been silly in 1998; in 2009, it’s ridiculous.
  
• NPR’s David Folkenflik apparently watches Jon Stewart, as his story this morning (watch out for the apparently new NPR.org popups) on the failings CNBC lifts, with no shame or attribution, from Stewart’s much discussed rant last week. Wouldn’t it have been cool if the journalist had done the story before the comedian?
  

When We’re forced to Replace Journalism with Google

This Chicago Tribune piece on a pending protest at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops may be a harbinger of the future of journalism, and of the demands placed on consumers who want to know more than a soundbite. The 250 word “article” (published on the unwieldy Chicago Breaking News site) tell us that SNAP (the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests) has called for Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George’s resignation without ever mentioning the reasons why. For that the enterprising consumer must search (alas, no links from CBN) for SNAP’s blog, where we are told that the demands stem from “recent disclosures about “several pedophile priests and corrupt supervisors” in his archdiocese.” SNAP is responding in particular to recent reports that the Cardinal has placed confessed pedophile, and “personal friend” Kenneth J. Martin as a consultant in offices adjacent to a school. (Wikipedia has details on a similar case involving the Cardinal’s failure to remove another priest. charged with abuse.)  The Tribune article shares none of this. In the past, we looked to professional journalists for such details, but increasingly we must fend for ourselves if we want details.

Trying to Clue-in the Naperville Sun

Jennifer Golz and her editor at the Naperville Sun could benefit from reviewing the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association’s Stylebook Supplement on LGBT Terminology. In reporting on a fairly standard theft conviction, Golz thinks it’s sooo weird to discover someone who prefers to live as a woman. In Male defendant’s lipstick, ponytail don’t deter judge at sentencing, Golz writes,

Taylur Harkless is a young man from Naperville…..Harkless donned a fitted black sweater and patent handbag, with his black hair pulled high atop his head in a ponytail. His lips quivered in red lipstick as Judge Kathryn Creswell sentenced the 18-year-old man for his role in the theft…He will join his accomplice and “lover,” Luis A. Aguilar, 21, of Aurora, who was sentenced to four years in prison

Besides the egregious use of inverted commas to refer to Harkless’s boyfriend, twice, (recalling some of Mike Royko’s most loathsome comments 20 years or so ago), the Sun doesn’t seem to grasp the concept of being transgendered, which the NLGJA defines as “people whose biological and gender identity or expression may not be the same. ” The Stylebook Supplement suggests “when writing about a transgender person, use the name and personal pronouns that are consistent with the way the individual lives publicly.”  Oh well, Naperville Sun, better luck next time you write about a  transgender resident of your community . As Sassafras points out, it doesn’t have to be that way.

LA Times can’t quite blog Tom Hanks’ endorsement

Do I detect a tone of curmudgeonly resentment in the LA Times’ Andrew Malcolm’s recent Top of the Ticket “blog” post?

In an obvious attempt to be ignored for a while, Tom Hanks with no fanfare, news release or hoopla, late tonight put up a video on his MySpace page endorsing Illinois Sen. Barack Obama for president.

“Blogger” Malcolm refuses to actually link to the video, and also fails to point out the self-declared history buff Hanks’ error– neither Obama nor anyone else will take the oath of office “in November.”

Why Won’t NBC Disclose that Carville is a Clinton Advisor?

CNN is being called to the mat for its failure to disclose its election analyst Bill Bennett’s support for and advisory role to the McCain campaign and recently said it would stop pretending that Clinton advisors Paul Begala and James Carville are neutral observers. NBC and Tim Russert do not see a need to inform its viewers that today’s guest James Carville is advising the Clinton campaign. On today’s Meet the Press, Carville was more a Clinton advocate than he was an objective pundit.

Of course, NBC and Russert don’t talk much about Carville’s ties to Russert.

Super-mega Tuesday Newspaper Endorsements– relevant in “highly visible races?”

The NYT endorsements of HRC, and McCain, made news on Friday; today we see that the largest papers in Illinois, Arizona and Washington all endorsed Obama on Sunday; as did the San Jose Mercury News.

The more interesting question to me is how helpful, and whether they’re a good idea. Tim Porter, in AJR in 2004, noted:

They have some value to some people some of the time in some circumstances, but no one can say how much to whom and when–for sure.

CQ:

Research suggests that newspaper endorsements have only a slight impact on election results. From 1940 to 2002, newspaper endorsements changed perhaps 1 percentage point of the vote, according to a 2004 study by Steve Ansolabehere, a political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, former dean of and now a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, has studied the issue over time and found that “the more visible the race, the less impact the endorsement has.”

Dean Jamieson, again, on the NewsHour in 04:

Kathleen Hall Jamieson… noted that endorsements are less important to readers than they are for the campaigns, which often use them as proof of their superiority over their rival. “The effect of the editorials doesn’t come out of people reading them, they come out of the ads by the candidates saying ‘I’ve been endorsed,’” Jamieson recently told UPI.