SOMEWHERE, DAN HARMON LOL’D So this happened: for an article on how the nation’s community colleges are underfunded and underperforming, the Washington Post’s editors (and caption writers) used the fictional school from NBC’s Community to illustrate the story. ”Greendale Community College is one of many institutions whose students are getting the short end of the higher ed stick,” the photo blurb reads. And with that, journalism entered the darkest timeline.
Tracks
We can only imagine what a heartbreaking and exhausting week it’s been for you and your city. But do know your newsroom colleagues here in Chicago and across the country stand in awe of your tenacious coverage. You make us all proud to be journalists.
We can’t buy you lost sleep, so at least let us pick up lunch.
A letter, accompanying several boxes of pizza, sent by staffers at the CHICAGO TRIBUNE to their friends at the Boston Globe.
As the folks at the Globe said, classy to the core.
In weighing a bid for The Los Angeles Times, Rupert Murdoch finds himself in a familiar role: waiting for rule changes from the government. With the resignation last week of Julius Genachowski, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, he may have to wait a little longer.
Mr. Murdoch, who has never shied away from a regulatory battle, has been beefing up News Corporation’s lobbying efforts in Washington in the last few months to urge regulators to revise a media ownership rule that would prevent the company from acquiring The Los Angeles Times and other newspapers in markets in which it already owns television stations.
“He wants it,” one person close to Mr. Murdoch said of The Los Angeles Times.
“They’re working on getting a waiver now,” added this person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal talks. But another person close to Mr. Murdoch said he currently considered a potential deal more trouble than it is worth given the regulatory hurdles in Washington.
The resignation of Mr. Genachowski, a Democrat, could further stall a plan favored by the departing chairman that would relax a longtime ban on consolidation between television stations and newspapers in local markets. The F.C.C. signaled on Friday that a vote on easing media ownership rules would move forward despite Mr. Genachowski’s departure.
Initially expected to be presented for a vote early this year, the measure has already faced several setbacks. Last month, Mr. Genachowski said there would be no vote until the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council, a Washington-based nonprofit, completed a study of the impact of cross-ownership on news gathering. That process could take several weeks, potentially pushing a vote to the summer.
In a series of letters sent to the F.C.C. late last year, Maureen A. O’Connell, News Corporation’s senior vice president for regulatory and government affairs, and Jared S. Sher, a vice president and associate general counsel at the company, argued that regulators should dissolve the cross-ownership rule. “There can be little debate today that the newspaper industry faces existential threats,” Ms. O’Connell wrote in a Dec. 7 letter documenting a meeting with agency officials. “We urged the F.C.C. to eliminate the cross-ownership rule as a relic from a bygone era.”
Any easing of the media ownership rule would face fierce opposition from groups that say too much consolidation threatens a free press. If Mr. Murdoch owned a major Hollywood studio and a newspaper known as the paper of record for the entertainment industry, it could spark additional skepticism.
The New York Times, “FCC Shift May Thwart a Murdoch Media Deal.”
I still cannot believe that companies are allowed to own more than one media outlet in a single market.
Elitists!
Both awesome heds, but I think the Post wins. :-)
The Washington Post will soon go behind a paywall.
SURELY YOU GESTURE: Someone at the Washington Post’s online desk tonight has a pointed sense of humor. Rimshot!
But a Times insider tells Grist that the decision probably means an end to the significant amount of freelance reporting that appeared in the Green blog. The insider, who’s not authorized to speak on the record about the blog’s closure, says, “I’m not 100 percent sure that we’re going to spend as much time on the environment as in the past. To a large extent that depends on the news. The paper is plastic — it reorganizes itself to meet the requirements of the world around us.” With that world getting warmer and weirder by the day, there shouldn’t be any shortage of climate and environmental news to report. If the Gray Lady is serious about keeping her green tint, that is.
New York Times kills its ‘Green’ blog | Grist
The end of the NYT Green Blog is reallly disappointing. Newspapers are cutting back on environmental reporting at the same time as climate problems are becoming more and more salient.
(via dendroica)
“The paper is plastic,” said Times employee Jesus H. Christ, who added that the world is getting “weirder by the day.”
The New Yorker New York magazine brings us the obit printed in the New York Times that dissed the New York Times.
The Reuters photo of that Boston umbrella lady is front pagin’ it today.
My greatest fear in the state of Maine: newspapers. I’m not a fan of newspapers.
Republican governor PAUL LePAGE, of Maine, to a classroom full of students.
In an interview with a newspaper reporter, he would later add, “There’s a lack of objectivity (in newspapers). If they were fair and balanced, I would be a supporter.”
Last year, he told a group of 8th graders that reading newspapers was “like paying somebody to tell you lies.”
It must be fun, being so overly uninformed and willfully ignorant.
Manhattan.
Pauline Friedman Phillips, aka Abigail van Buren, aka the “Abby” in Dear Abby, has died. She was 94.
So, the Chicago Sun-Times does this thing where it describes the weather in the top corner of the front page with one word and I legit have not stopped laughing for five minutes because I just noticed that today’s weather is RUDE
Wonderful.
(Source: theprincedouche)
OLDPAPER A man read a copy of the final edition of the Financial Times Deutschland in Berlin Friday. The business daily bade farewell to readers in a paper packed with gallows humor and melancholy musings on the revolution in the media industry. The wood translates to ‘Finally black.’ (Photo: Thomas Peter / Reuters via The Wall Street Journal)
The opinion pages are not the news pages.
Newspapers are essential to a functioning society. They inform; they provide context; they shine a spotlight on the shortcomings of bureaucracy, the overreaches of government (yes, this does happen — just perhaps not in the insidious manner that conservatives seem to think, or imply), socioeconomic imbalances and inequities, the haves and the have-nots. Newspapers are critically important, even if many (not most) of them dedicate pages to gossip, and horoscopes, and the trivial pursuits of celebrity. Newspapers provide a continuous, continual foundation for learning; a first draft of history, as the saying goes.
And that’s why it’s absolutely essential to hear from them who they think should be President. These are endorsements not made in a vacuum, nor are they necessarily made based on personal politics (although it may be hard to argue that for a newspaper owned by an avowed right-winger like Rupert Murdoch — I’m talking to you, New York Post and Wall Street Journal). The men and women that make up editorial boards see things objectively and subjectively, and since they are not journalists per se, that’s permitted. It’s that point-of-view that allows, say, the Los Angeles Times editorial board to write, about Mitt Romney, that
it’s irresponsible to seek a deep, permanent tax cut when the government is deeply in the red. And Romney would exacerbate the situation by spending extravagantly on defense even as the last of the Bush-era wars ends.
That’s something their political reporters — as objective journalists — simply cannot do, and should never do. These editorial boards have a bird’s-eye worldview, detached yet attached, and that’s what allows them to make their endorsements, giving their readers something to think about before they head to the ballot box.
Newspapers, by and large, are how the educated electorate become educated. And there is nothing more important to the survival of a democracy than masses, enlightened.
For the good of the republic, read on. And take in an opinion or two.
