Why we don't use Comic Sans in newspapers

A great blog about a great font.

Newspapers getting greedy, or skittish, on hiring

In the past six months, I've had one job killed (at a weekly no less), after corporate had been pushing the publisher to fill it ASAP. Then, corporate, at Hartman Newspapers in Texas, pulled the job.

Meanwhile, in Los Alamos, N.M., the publisher there apparently considered his initial managing editor ad an excuse to float a trial balloon, then either get greedier on position demands, or else decide to get rid of somebody else and fold that work into the M.E.'s position. (Since he won't talk about the details of his re-advertising the position, I don't know which it is.)

Anyway, there is, or is supposed to be, such a thing as media ethics internally as well as externally, isn't there?

Laptop computers an enabler of bad reporting, or what?

Picture a paper that has two important local events, one a city council meeting possibly awarding an $8 million grant payout for a mixed-use development and the other an appearance by Maya Angelou, and the stories get done at 10 p.m., both, because, apparently, the paper has an issue with reporters using laptops ...

My, what a formerly unmotivated Today Newspapers employee can do

If Today Newspapers had had as many ads on its website as The Suburban now does, it never would have folded.

On the other hand, since it has no real, and definitely no really fresh, news on the site, those ads may be selling at bargain basement rates.

Anonymous sourcing means 'tweaked' quotes

Ed Cohen raises another valid concern about the rise of anonymous comments in BOTH old and new media. And that is that anonymous comments usually have the commenter "tweaking" the quote before it sees the light of day.

In other words, BOTH old AND new media that use anonymous sources are becoming ever more propaganda by the day.

'New media' can write misleading headlines, get journalism wrong

Bora Zivkovic, or Coturnix, is a very good science writer. And, he's an activist touter of the wonders of "new media." But, a Facebook note of his shows part of why I take "new media" with a grain of salt.

Start with the header "journalism" when he's just talking about academic journalism. Especially online, where there's no headline length limit, why the header didn't say "science journalism" or "academic journalism," I don't know.

The post is about whether or not public information officers do journalism. In academia, arguably, maybe they do. It's still iffy. Did the University of Utah's PIO do "journalism" after the Fleischmann/Pons "oops" of 1989? I doubt it.

But, in the second half of his post, Bora, through a couple of analogies, talks about general-purpose journalism, and is totally wrong there. Plus, his idea that an energy company should sponsor science pages in a newspaper? What idiocy in general. And that they should do it because newspapers are losing ad money?

Rather, Bora, and friends of yours such as Jay Rosen, that's argument for MY shibboleth — paywalls for online newspapers. Or, at a minimum alternative, delayed publishing of online content, at least that which is locally generated.

Anonymous sourcing: ain't just the MSM

Glenn Greenwald rightly bemoans what seems to be a worsening of the use of anonymous sourcing in inside-the-Beltway reporting.

But, as I e-mailed him, this isn't just a "mainstream media" phenomenon.

I’ll hold out Talking Points Memo as a prime example, since it developed from “just a blog” into doing its own news reporting.

A couple of months ago, for example (sorry, don’t have link), one of its staff reported the “latest” on Obama’s heath care push, with a couple of different angles from inside the WH. Nothing close to national security involved, of course.

But... At least five or six different anonymously sourced comments.

Well, I was, to be blunt, disgusted to some degree when I saw that, and I think a few other TPM regular readers were too. That said, neither the reporter nor Josh Marshall commented in response, said we’re sorry, etc.

I’ll venture a guess that as “new media” tries to get more and more into reporting, not just commentary, it will do more of the same selling itself out.

So, let’s not say this is just an MSM problem.