American Journalism Review

Mondo Times editors    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 1:21pm on Friday, August 21st, 2009

Facts are lazy and facts are late, or so people are inclined to believe, writes AJR editor and publisher Rem Rieder in the article "Daydream Believers," published on August 18, 2009:

"Chico Marx once famously asked, "Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?"

America has become a country filled with people who stubbornly continue to believe what they want to believe, regardless of the facts.

Take the so-called birthers, who refuse to accept that President Obama is an American citizen, despite ample evidence showing that he is.

Or those who embrace the notion that the health care legislation working its way through Congress would establish "death panels" that would "pull the plug on grandma," even though it clearly wouldn't.

It's the job of journalists to sort out such contretemps, to determine where the truth lies. But what do you do when a significant portion of the electorate ignores the findings?"

The full story:
http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4797

Eric Kallgren    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 2:31pm on Wednesday, February 4th, 2009

In the February/March 2009 issue of AJR, Lee Thornton interviewed Steven Brill about the newspaper business:

"If I were to give the same speech today," he says, "I would say the press has to stop committing suicide by giving journalism away for free. Start charging for it, start believing in your product."

For Brill, the nation's newspapers have missed a huge advertising opportunity. "Newspapers didn't do what they should have done at the time I gave that speech, which was to set up their own vibrant [online] classified advertising sections," he says. "Why wouldn't you set up the most robust classified advertising online? The answer is, they said, 'Oh God, if we do that, it'll cut into our print advertising.' They didn't want to cannibalize themselves, which is an understandable reaction, so they let someone else cannibalize them."

And he thinks newspapers were wrong not to charge for their content on the Web. "Newspapers have basically destroyed themselves by giving it away for free," he says. Brill cites as an example the Washington Post. To read its Style section, he says, he once paid hundreds of dollars a year for New York home delivery. "Then Donnie Graham decided that I needed a subsidy. So they now e-mail the Style section for free." The ever-outspoken Brill thinks that's "totally insane.""

Eric Kallgren    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 3:17pm on Wednesday, January 28th, 2009

In the December/January 2009 issue, American Journalism Review writer Robert Hodierne wondered if there is life after newspapers:

"(Erica) Smith tallied 15,554 newspaper job cuts for 2008, and she was still updating in January. Her research is artfully rendered on a Web page called "paper cuts" and appears to be the only such comprehensive list.

"I started out because I was curious about the number of cuts. Now it's because I have too many friends who've been laid off," says Smith, 32, who got into the newspaper business right after graduating from Northwest Missouri State University.

Her tally, which she builds from news releases, wire reports, blogs and tips from colleagues, includes all newspaper jobs, not just those in the newsroom. But she estimates half of those 15,000 cuts were journalists. And that means the newsroom population of American papers shrank by about 15 percent last year, down from 52,000 at the start of the year. That's three times larger than the single greatest annual newsroom employment decrease since 1978, when the American Society of Newspaper Editors began making estimates of the editorial workforce.

But it's worse than that. Smith cautions that her count actually understates the total because many newspapers don't announce layoffs. What's more, her total does not include jobs lost through attrition.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' count for all newspaper jobs – from reporter to delivery truck driver – shows the payroll shrinking from 336,000 at the start of the year to 313,600 through October, a drop of 22,400 positions."