Jay Rosen's New Media '10 Cmdts' ain't necessarily true

Starting wit his claim media atomization has been overcome. It hasn't, because of the price level of new media. To the degree it consolidates, then it will professionalize, with some of the issues of "old media."

For instance, more than three years ago, in Dallas, a group of people started a site called Pegasus News. It serves as an aggregator of bloggers (and maybe Twitterers, soon enough) on local arts, entertainment, politics, etc, while mixing in rewrites and expansions of press releases and the occasional actual story.

So, my default, if you're one the cool/lucky bloggers to have been picked up, especially early in Pegasus' history, and especially if it was without being noticed by the Dallas Morning News, you've got an inside edge.

So, in that sense, atomization may be lessened. But, Pegasis doesn't run all of the blog posts it gets from bloggers it "favorites." So, it's now ... wait for it ... a filter.

Some of the commandments are "fat chance," like this from Rosen's second commandment:

Closed systems [i.e. old media] bring editorial oversight and the authority of a respected brand while open ones crowdsource information and are easy to use. What both systems should have is trust and ethics.

But, if Rosen would have read Tech Crunch's pieceon an infamous Fort Hood-posted Army blogger, which I blogged about here, he'd be more circumspect about the likelihood of that happening soon.

Another of his commandments he just throws out without saying what will happen to it:

"Half my advertising is wasted, I just don't know which half."
Unlike the first six recent quotes, this one is almost a century old. Rosen attributes it to Philadelphia businessman John Wanamaker/

But, Rosen doesn't wonder what will happen ot the good half vs. wasted half of advertising if he's wrong, and the new media does remain atomized to some degree.

Others of the commandments aren't "wrong," they just fall into "what does this mean?" If people need better filters, since "old media" now isn't a "filtering force," or whatever, will they just give up instead? Give up filtering, or eventually tune out?

Rosen, along with Jeff Jarvis and some others (I don't think Clay Shirky is that bad) need to take to heart a previous post of mine, that "Internet triumphalism is not a public good.

It's kind of frustrating for people like this to be triumphal to the point of making overstated new media guru claims. Be more modest, realistic and fact-based about what's actually happening, or you start repeating the mistakes, and the hubris, of the old media on which you shovel dirt.

'Old media' vs. 'new media' and media vs. messages

"Old media" vs. "new media"? The difference is ultimately in the medium more than the message quality. Yes, blogs have broken news stories before the "MSM" and Twitter has added color to stories, but Twitter has releasd just as much inaccurate info as the MSM outlets at breaking news events, adn blogs can look like news but be as slanted as bad MSM coverage.

Give me paywalls - from the top down

It's nice that some seven-day dailies, which have a fair amount of local news content, are going to paywalls, but really, that's not enough to solve the national issue.

The real problem, though, is lack of leadership by the AP, not individual newspapers. AP ought to put mandatory paywalls, with anti-Reuters/AFP exclusivity, into another revision of new AP contract. Then, it ought to abut quintuple its rates for Google et al, (with similar exclusivity clauses), high enough that Google would have to paywall, too, and couldn't do this on ads alone.

Who died and made Jay Rosen God of what's wrong with papers?

Some of his ideas about the future of media are good, but others, like saying papers ought to forget about putting up paywalls, are lunacy.

So, we should ignore the fact that ads will likely NEVER monetize online papers, and rely on the kindness of tip jars, pledge drives and whatever else?

If people like him actually worked at papers, it would be one thing, but he's an academic. As for Jeff Jarvis, another bloviator, I swear he's on Google's payroll.

Poetic thoughts on newspapers, tech and punditrynews

The tombstone silence
Of the quiet places
In a not-so-noisy daily newspaper
Are symbolic.
Symbolic of death by technology,
Death by over-technology,
Death by technomancy.
Anti-Luddites say
The news will always be there.
But, who will pay?
Donations will only go so far
In a Balkanized “information” world,
Subscriptions remain anathema to many,
And, the Googleization of online text ads
Means there’s little money there.
So blogs consolidate,
Between a precious few New Media “winners”
And detritus eates of the Old Media,
Whie Twitterers blithely tweet.
What’s new?
New information,
Or just new communications speech,
Whether news, information, or misinformation?
You know that, but
“They,” of media both old and new,
As well as pundits thereof,
Won’t admit it.
And so, per a ’60s rock song,
The media is still the same.

No, newspapers aren’t dead yet, and they probably aren’t that close

Which is why I get frustrated by people both well-meaning and intelligent who want to bury newspapers, especially the hardcopy versions thereof.

First, yes, newspaper readership has been stagnant since what, the early 1960s? But, if you throw out illegal immigration, and even a fair chunk of first-generation legal immigrants, as a percentage of the populace, readership didn’t decline that much until the age of the Internet.

Second, half of the revenue decline of the last 2-3 years is due to the recession, pure and simple. Much of the ad losses will bounce back, except for some car and some real estate dinero.

More proof that a fair part of what does ail newspapers is recession-related? The rumors of an impending CBS bankruptcy, whether true or not — sparked by CBS’s ad sales dropoff.

Meanwhile, Eric Schmidt doesn’t know what he’s talking about. First of all, Herr Freeloader (albeit abetted by the clueless chairman of the AP, Dean Singleton), there’s a difference between “news” and “information.” And, except when Google links to AP, Reuters or AFP news stories, you provide information, not news.

(Also, side note to Schmidt: Stop lying about how much China censors the Internet and how much you self-censor Google there. That alone makes the rest of your claims less believable.

And, while you’re at it, tell us if Jeff Jarvis gets paid a retainer by you.)

And, none of this mentions Google becoming the new Microslob, a point I've blogged about before.

Now, back to why newspapers are still going to be around.

Especially in smaller markets, businesses need a vehicle for advertising. Radio usually doesn’t cut it, and TV is too expensive for too many local advertisers.

That leaves a conventional newspaper vs. a shopper.

Shoppers are all ads; the worse aren’t even fully disambiguated by type of product, etc.

Newspapers have style and design, and news, which people want to read about local and regional events, to set off ads.

More proof that newspapers aren’t so bad off? The New York Times has plans to start a Chicago regional issue and maybe others.

Online ads? Thanks to Herr Schmidt, the margin on them is sinking out of sight, and newspapers are finally wising up that advertising-only is NOT a profit angle for online newspapers. Add in the fact that between hosts files, ad blockers, etc., that those in the know can block most online ads, and that there’s also a fine, and usually violently crossed, border between “creative” and “annoying” with online ads, and they don’t work for most advertisers, either.

Now, what are newspapers doing WRONG?

Plenty. Details after the jump.


One, most still don’t have paywalls, though more are talking about them again. And, those that are going beyond talk are often pricing them high, to which I say GOOD! Casual readers can go away. Real ones will pay for online-only, or else will buy a hardcopy subscription with a free online one with that.

Two, it’s possible that, at all but the biggest dailies, a lot of ad salespeople still don’t know how to sell online ads. It’s wholly different. At the minimum, instead of taking a couple of pages of spec sheets, if you want to show something to a customer, you have to take a laptop computer. And, you have to be “Internet intuitive” in some way.

Three, though, is that many newspaper corporations/execs have been incompetent, mainly in running up massive debt. That debt came from buying other overvalued newspapers 7-10 years ago, buying back their own then-overvalued stock, etc. Per the lines of pre-deregulation utilities, they need to accept smaller profit margins, look for “steadiness,” stop trying to buy each other out, and go from there.

That said, even with some of these chains in Chapter 11, let’s note that almost all individual daily papers in the U.S. still have decent, or better, profit margins. And, with the Minneapolis Star-Tribune coming out of Chapter 11 pretty decently on its debt restructuring, if its new management (unfortunately, primarily from LBOs) remembers the points I just stressed, it should do OK in the future.

Four, tying points two and three immediately above together, many of those same CEOs are clueless, still, about how the Net likely never will be monetized for newspapers on an ads-only basis. In hardcopy, for pay newspapers, circulation traditionally paid one-quarter the freight. Why, instead of a TV model, didn’t newspapers take their own financial model to the Net in the start?


Five, is it too late today to install a paywall? No. First, see the AJR column I linked. Second, if Dean Singleton had more brains, he would implement mandatory paywalls for AP content as part of new AP content package contracts.

He would then, instead of haggling with Google about a few dinky ads, would quadruple or quintuple the rates AP charges it, and have an exclusivity sidebar in there which would force Google to treat AFP and Reuters the same to avoid the freeloader problem.

The price would be set so high that, even after negotiated downward, Google couldn’t afford to cover it with ads alone, unless it wanted to do so as a major loss leader. In other words, if Dean-o had brains, he would force Google, Yahoo and MSN to paywall also.

But, while he may have built MediaNews into an empire, I’ve never accused Dean Singleton of having brains while running the AP.

As for online-only newspapers, if they don’t paywall, they have to depend on donations from individuals, non-profit foundations, or both. The latter puts you at the whim of non-profit interests, or potentially so. The former has worked for a couple of blogs that have expanded into reporting, like Talking Points Memo, but only (so far) for narrow, focused political news. Ditto for online papers.

Will people donate for bonus local sports coverage? Hell, no, is my intuitive answer. Ditto for feature stories. Will they donate for something as mundane as community calendar listings?

So, online newspapers, without paywalls, will simply balkanize the situation further.

(Note: This paywall issue and related parts will be posted again, separately.)

Newspapers - pretty alive for a 'dying' industry

More proof that newspapers aren’t so bad off? The New York Times has plans to start a Chicago regional issue and maybe others.

More proof that a fair part of what does ail newspapers is recession-related? The rumors of an impending CBS bankruptcy, whether true or not — sparked by CBS’s ad sales dropoff.

No, no, no to ‘non-profit’ newspaper start-ups

Among other things, pay in corner office suites is NOT so “non-profit,” as Jack Shafer notes.

Second, some of these start-ups leaning heavily on student interns means an unfair wage advantage, AND poorer news quality; see here for more.

Third, back to Shafer. Non-profit journalism is at the whims of its donors just as corporate journalism is at the whims of its owners.

Beyond Shafer: Yes, a Talking Points Memo has been successful with fund drives, but despite the Wal-Mart touch, how many readers will pay — and pay and pay and pay — to become “donors” rather than simply subscribing?

In that vein, non-profit papers are no more ready to address the paywall situation than are “old media” newspapers, it seems. And, so, will be not much more successful at new media hoops until they do.

On the other hand, the idea of just letting newspapers die is stupid in general, and is “rich” coming from someone at Newsweek, struggling more than a lot of newspapers.

Should we subsidize newspapers?

I'm worried about benign paternalism more than actual active interference, but The Nation argues that newspapers need a direct tax infusion, as is the case in Europe.

That said, to avoid partisanship like we've had over the Corporation for Public Broadcasting budget, along with those of NEA, NEH, etc., we'd have to launch this program with a multi-year budget.

That said, while PBS is not a total lapdog, it's not the best example that could be cited, either? Or NPR. They're perhaps better than commercial networks, but not great.

Govt support can ONLY go to entities that declare themselves nonprofit, is one stipulation -- with strict definitions of what nonprofit is, like, say Pacifica.

Murdoch to charge to read all online papers

Of course, the Wall Street Journal already charges for some content, but this is news indeed, and good news.

My only question is, does he mean just staff-generated news, or is he going to try to charge for wires, too?

To me, this has been one of the biggest failures of Dean Singleton as head of the Associated Press — the failure to push for a paywall, perhaps as a mandatory requirement under the new AP package, then doubling or tripling charges to Yahoo, Google, et al. And, playing hardball with AFP and Reuters if they don’t want to play along.

Dallas Morning News planning more layoffs?

A source of mine says it's likely. And, sadly, it's not hard to see why.

I took a gander at today's paper, not to read a single story, but to eyeball inches on display ads. Here's a quick summary.

• Front section? About 30 percent ads, decent amount of them color.
• Metro? Almost adless, not counting obits.
• Guide section? About 10 percent, not counting the four pages of advertorial. (And, how many people, like me, wonder if newspapers will eventually take the "advertorial" tag off advertorial items, if there's any way they can?)
• Business section? It did have a full-page color Ebby Halliday ad at back. Otherwise, not counting classifieds, about 10 percent ads.
• ONE non-classified ad in the entire sports section. (That said, people who defend major daily newspaper sports coverage in general? Sure, people may read it, but it's always been below normal on display ad inches. If you are, or have been, in the journalism business and still want to try to defend it, stop. It is indefensible from a business position.)
• Overall? About 15 percent display ads.

For people who don't know, a healthy margin is about 60-40 advertising to editorial copy. And since, traditionally, major newspapers have relied 75 percent on advertising, 25 percent on circulation, now you can understand just how bad of trouble this is.

And, most auto ads? Never coming back. Real estate? Will be slow, even in a relatively "bubbleless" DFW.

As for going more and more online? People still haven't figured out how to adequately monetize online ad revenues. And, while you save trees, paper, ink and press costs, you still need (theoretically) web copy editors, online content/upload editors, etc.

Blogging? That's like the Morning News thinking it's like the NY Times editorial page during Times Select times. You see much in the way of ad revenue there?

With newspapers like this …

It’s no wonder the industry is struggling.

The more I look for jobs, the more idiocy I see within the newspaper world (And I’m not just looking for jobs there.)

Here’s one example: A semiweekly paper that just did a website redesign that, except for the top banner, has no locally sold ads, just Google AdSense ads. And, you can’t even access classifieds online with this paper now.

Another… a group of two weekly papers and one semiweekly in the same market as a five-day daily that covers most the same territory, and saying they use their joint website to be like a daily. (The competition to is the best five-day daily, on both design and content, I’ve ever seen, going by the one issue in the racks.) That said, the group of non-dailies does have each of its editors cut a video short each week.

Yet another. A seven-day daily with no staff photographer is bad enough. One that runs submitted photos as the lead art half the time is even worse. (And it’s the rare duck that’s afternoon M-F and mornings Sat-Sun.)

My own former paper, which was doing all sorts of dumb ad trade-outs, like swapping a 1x8 ad to Cinemark in exchange for movie passes, or giving the eventual ad sales manager’s hubby a 2x5 trade-out in exchange for him allegedly being our computer consultant, even though he only knew PCs and not Macs.

Atlantic and WaPost hypocrisy fest

As readers who follow national politics may already know, the Atlantic Monthly didn’t comment on the Washington Post’s “pay-to-play” salons because it’s been doing pretty much the same thing and, so far at least, is even less repentant than the Post.

Speaking of that, though, the Post says it will conduct an internal investigation of it’s own salon plans and how they got to be the way they did.

Given that Publisher Katherine Weymouth has refused to fall on the sword herself, and still isn’t:

Weymouth said she was on vacation last week and did not see the invitation that was sent out in her name

(As if the flier invitation is the only thing wrong about this)

And Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli really can’t be as ignorant of what happened as he claims, it’s clear that “internal investigation” means scapegoat searching.

Let’s let Post political reporter Dan Balz talk about that:

“I think everyone still has questions about how this collective breakdown occurred. This was not just two people in a room. There were a number of discussions about it. That part concerned me. Everyone knows the dinners were a bad idea.”

It appears new marketing exec Charles Pelton, already fingered for the fliers about the salons, would be scapegoating target No. 1.

That said, how different is this from newspapers spiking, toning down, delaying, or otherwise bollixing up stories for fear of offending major advertisers?

Not much. So, in that sense, this is nothing new.

The end of a newspaper era

It looks like Today Newspapers, a group of south suburban Dallas newspapers, and my employer for most the last 9 and 1/2 years, less an eight-month hiatus, is now history.

Causes? Many.

The recession and the newspaper economy in general.

Others in particular? South suburban Dallas is tough. The Dallas Morning News never even tried to run a free-standing paper here, other than their (subsidized?) freebie tabs they do now in different parts of the Metroplex.

At the same time, in a Tar Baby style dysfunctional relationship, many civic leaders in the “Best Southwest” suburbs have, for years, done what I call “whoring after the Morning News,” riffing on the Old Testament prophets’ comments about Israel “whoring after the Ba’als.”

Schadenfreude, in a large glass says, Fine, now you have the News, or either a small daily paper with unaudited circulation which doesn’t run school lunch menus, honor rolls and more, to cover your area.

And, some of the problems were peculiar to our staff. Without going into details, or throwing people too far under the bus, we never did get much in the way of online ad sales from our staff, who never seemed that interested in learning more about doing online sales, sales techniques for online ads, etc. (Of course, one of our ad reps claimed she could always get a job up at the News, which wasn’t likely even before all of its cuts.)

I do feel sorry for people in our area who will miss us and know what they’re missing. As for the rest, no.

The actual ending? To riff on George Santayana, both tragedy and farce at the same time. Pettiness from our webmaster, taking down all news stories off the website, because somebody else had already "moved" CDs with archived digital hardcopy pages, photos, etc.

Beyond that, I’ve been wanting out of newspaper journalism more and more. If I have to stay in it shorter-term, fine. But, I know there are other things that better fit my skills and acumen, even if I didn’t go to the right Ivy League or other school.

MediaNews’ I-News sounds like DMN’s CueCat

So MediaNews is starting what it calls an “Individuated News: personalized newspaper?

Peter Vandevanter, vice president of targeted products for MediaNews Group, told the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) “The Power of Print Conference” that the subscribers will get home delivery of a printed paper, through home printers or portable devices, with content personalized to their demands and including hyper-targeted advertising and coupon offers.

So, on the ad side, MediaNews and Dean Singleton are trying to out-Google Google and Sergey Brin? Good luck with that. Coupons? BFD. Everybody knows their use rate is in single digits.

If I want to read hardcopy, I can just go to a webpage and hit “print” if I have a home printer. If it doesn’t correctly format for 8.5x11, I can copy the text and paste in a Word document. Plus, if I have ad-block settings and/or a good hosts file, I don’t get any of Singleton’s ads.

What moronity.

But wait, that’s not ALL the moronity. The MediaNews printer ain’t a freebee:

Subscribers buy the printer at a deep discount and pay a “modest” subscription fee, Vandenvanter told Mitchell. The newspaper reimburses subscribers for the consumable. Advertisers pay the newspaper for targeted ads.

Even THAT isn’t all the moronity. Allegedly, advertising rates for the I-News product “are 10 times print advertising rates.”

Good luck with that one!

Time vs Time on Sotomayor

Does Time magazine not have a managing editor anymore? Or has the Internet basically castrated the powers of such a person at what is theoretically a weekly newsmagazine?

At Time, Karen Tumulty says Sotomayor WILL get a tough Senate fight: “Indeed, a fight is a political inevitability.”

(Sidebar nutbarrery: Wendy Long of the Judicial Confirmation Network calling the current SCOTUS “liberal activist.”)

Anyway, in contradistinction to Tumulty, Time’s Mark Halperin predicts smooth sailing for Sotomayor.

So, which is it?

And, in a broader, more philosophical question, are more magazines of news and opinion going to become more like this – little more than quasi-freelancers under one roof?

Dallas Morning News hiring again?? WTF?

That’s about all I can say after seeing ads for a Dallas city hall reporter and a Dallas ISD reporter at Journalism Jobs, just two months after taking a meat axe to its editorial staff.

Sac Bee goes chickenshit on Cal voters op-ed

In the wake of California voters rejecting five budget-related referenda, the Sacramento Bee originally had a FANTASTIC house editorial spanking the voters’ collective tuchises. But then, top management at the Bee, apparently after a flood of calls and e-mails (interestingly, the Bee announced a few weeks ago its looking for an editorial page editor) got cold feet, pulled the original (the Bee has turned off Google Cache, but the idiots thought the whole world had, I guess), and substituted this limp drivel.

Don’t get me wrong. The California Legislature deserved a spanking too. But NOT at the expense of letting California voters off the hook. The Bee cravenly abdicated its editorial page responsibility and duty.

The original editorial did just that, telling California voters, in more words, they were 20-million plus credit card users now blaming the state for failing to rescue them from their own overcharging without paying for it.

Metered newspaper charges?

Amongst all the different ways to try to get people to pony up for reading newspapers, I hadn’t heard anybody mention the option “the New York Times is considering.

Basically, it’s something similar to your cell phone bill, or the way your ISP bill may have been in the past, or may still be today.

You buy an account with a limit, except in this case the limit will be pageviews or online words rather than minutes. As the story notes, setting the base rate price is key. If you set it right, and get enough people reading, you can charge pretty high “extra” fees.

Of course, the next question is what goes behind the paywall. Times Select flopped with its columnists, which was probably embarrassing to them.

I’d start with the Mag and the Review of Books. Narrowly focused audiences, more dedicated than average readers, even average Times readers.

Clay Shirky on the ‘whys’ of newspaper demise

Clay Shirky has three great posts on why the online newspaper world, as a business model, is basically vaporizing. I’m going to look at all three.

First, Shirky gives us the big picture of where we’re at today and why, including why the TV-radio model, the “digital garden” model of pay circulation, the micropayment model like iTunes and others, won’t work.

Here’s his nut graf, about one-quarter the way down:

The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the ’90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan: “Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!” The details differed, but the core assumption behind all imagined outcomes (save the unthinkable one) was that the organizational form of the newspaper, as a general-purpose vehicle for publishing a variety of news and opinion, was basically sound, and only needed a digital facelift. As a result, the conversation has degenerated into the enthusiastic grasping at straws, pursued by skeptical responses.

He next looks at the details of why some proposed alternative models won’t work, and have already been proven that way, at least to some degree:

“The Wall Street Journal has a paywall, so we can too!” (Financial information is one of the few kinds of information whose recipients don’t want to share.) “Micropayments work for iTunes, so they will work for us!” (Micropayments only work where the provider can avoid competitive business models.) “The New York Times should charge for content!” (They’ve tried, with QPass and later TimesSelect.) “Cook’s Illustrated and Consumer Reports are doing fine on subscriptions!” (Those publications forgo ad revenues; users are paying not just for content but for unimpeachability.) “We’ll form a cartel!” (…and hand a competitive advantage to every ad-supported media firm in the world.)

Shirky then pronounces his judgment, and it’s a somber one:

Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.

Shirky goes on to like how the Internet is doing some form of what (we hope) Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction” to print media is the biggest such change since Gutenberg and the printing press.

I insert the link multiple times because this is a LONG blog post; twice as long as many a newspaper column, and because it’s WELL worth reading. So read it.

But, as I said, this is only one of three posts.

Shirky also tackles the details of the micropayments model and why it won’t work. First, we relisten to the same songs, but don’t re-read the same newspaper story. Second, Napster and its kin have been declared illegal; blogging and hyperlinks have done something different in media.

He then takes a more general look at the micropayments model. He says part of the problem is that the various micropayments models under discussion are entirely publisher-driven and don’t take the reader into account.

If that’s not enough for you, back in 2003, Shirky listed out the multitude of failed micropayment programs.

Read all four, not three, links I’ve provided, and accept that the mass-audience newspaper of today is probably doomed.

That all said, Shirky is light on prescriptions for the future.

And, as I blogged last week, online advertising is becoming the junk mail of the Internet world.

If various versions of charge-for-content aren’t going to work, and, with Shirky’s acknowledgement that the Gutenberg Revolution 2.0 will throw out lot of experimental models, at the least, I’d like to see Shirky throw out some ideas, and handicap some of the more promising models out there.

Can newspapers save themselves?

First of all, despite claims to the contrary, Internet advertising is NOT very likely going to save newspapers.

My analogy is that Internet advertising is like the Red River in West Texas in summer – it’s a mile wide but only an inch deep.

Here’s the bottom line.

The failure is ultimately trying to apply a hardcopy business model to the Net. Papers, and mags, HAVE TO, even if the barn doors are already open, start charging for online content. Ads alone, in the online world, WILL NOT make a paper profitable.

Walter Isaacson says microcontent sales are the ticket, unaware that that’s already doable, and showing that Isaacson himself doesn’t have an answer.

Even readers of small dailies, semiweeklies and weeklies have gotten used to getting stories for free, off the Net.

The AP is going to have to revisit contracts with Google, Yahoo, etc., especially with Google selling its own ads on newspaper-linked stories now. It’s that simple.

Some non-dailies have pretty good websites, and I don’t just mean metropolitan alt-weeklies. And they sell ads well. Many other papers don’t. Even people at level of newspapers demand more and more free content all the time.

Why bankers aren't newspaper editors

In the interest of improving efficiency or something, and showing that she's doing that to some would-be investors and or a bank that might show some loan-based largess, our owner/publisher is putting editors on the clock.

NEVER have heard of that before.

Bankers have no clue how the editorial world works.

Dallas Morning News shows bias in Sharon Keller story

In reporting the fact that Sharon Keller, the presiding judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, will have to justify her conduct in closing the door and phones of her office at 5 p.m. Sept. 25, 2007, the day Michael Richard’s lawyers planned to file an appeal based on the U.S. Supreme Court accepting a case on the constitutionality of lethal injection that same day, and told Keller’s office the appeal was running late due to computer problems, the Morning News said:

The "notice of formal proceedings" issued by the commission comes after more than a year of orchestrated public outrage over the handling of Michael Richard's case.

To which, I e-mailed reporter Diana Jennings:

The word "orchestrated" in the phrase "after more than a year of orchestrated public outrage" I found to be quite editorially biased, not just a "bit," in fact.

I needed NOBODY to "orchestrate" my outrage over Judge Keller's callousness, thank you very much. That said, you've given me something to blog about.

Geez, Unbelievable it would say that.

Google CEO Schmidt offers ideas to save papers

Gooogle CEO Eric Schmidt says he truly would bemoan the demise of the daily paper, then offers steps to prevent that.

Schmidt said Google is NOT looking at acquistions, investments or other financial help of its own.

To me, one of the most intriguing tools he did mention is going the nonprofit route. Schmidt mentions ProPublica. Britain's Guardian is an example across the pond.

Elsewhere and in response, Dan Froomkin goes Schmidt one better, suggesting Google form some sort of nonprofit umbrella structure. He also suggests that, even if Schmidt doesn't want to bail out for-profit newspapers, it consider investing in a nonprofit group like ProPublica.

That said, the problem is the Internet, not Google. Shouldn't we also be asking Ballmer what Microsoft should do? Or whomever winds up running Yahoo?