New Writings (Dec. 10, 2007)

Hey folks. In case you were wondering what I have been writing lately (other than my blog), here are some new stories for this week:

• These pesky Broadway and Hollywood strikes are creating an interesting ripple in the insurance world. (Via Insurance Journal)
• The head of the Connecticut Workers Compensation Committee group warns that changes could be afoot in that state’s workers comp system. Why? Because most of the legislators are newbies. (Via Hartford Business Journal)

Boston University’s Strange Journo-Marketing

I just got around to sorting some of the mail and magazines on my desk. I was reading through the most recent issue of Bostonia, which is the alumni magazine of Boston University. There is a profile of WBUR, the NPR-affiliate based at B.U. At one point in the piece, the writer makes this awkward reference to an alumna, considering the story is running in a combination marketing and journalism mag.

As recently as two years ago, newspaper stories about WBUR described the station as troubled. They noted its growing debt to BU and the cancellation of The Connection, then the station’s flagship program, with a huge national following. Prior to that was the October 2004 resignation of longtime general manager Jane Christo (CAS’65) amid accusations of mismanagement, many eventually deemed not credible by a BU investigation.

Does that strike anyone else as weird, knowing this is a puff piece promoting B.U.? I can’t quite decide if it’s very bad marketing or very good journalism.

[BTW, the things an internal investigation found that Christo did were not all that interesting.]

Update: Questioning The AIDS Rate Story

Here’s an addenda to my earlier post about the AIDS infection rate growing among teens and young adults. I suggested that one reason for the jump might be the rise of abstinence-only sex education. Well, lo and behold, a new study comes out and says that the teen birth rate has jumped and the reason: the rise of abstinence-only education.

(S)ome experts said they have been expecting a jump. They blamed it on increased federal funding for abstinence-only health education that doesn’t teach teens how to use condoms and other contraception.

Isn’t this really a very similar scenario with a totally different analysis? Both AIDS and pregnancy are direct results of unprotected sex. Both AIDS infections and teen pregnancies saw their first rise in years. Yet for AIDS, experts blame a perception that AIDS is less dangerous; for teen pregnancy experts blame abstinence-only education. Couldn’t it be true that rising AIDS infection rates could ALSO be related to the rise of abstinence-only education? It at least seems probable.

To be fair, it could also be vice versa: The perception among teenagers that pregnancies don’t happen has led to an increase in teen pregnancies. To some degree this could be happening, but I doubt it’s the best explanation.

Feel free to comment below.

Iraq Makes For Costly Coverage

Columbia Journalism Review has a pretty good editorial in the Nov./Dec. issue about how news organizations are learning to boost news coverage and reduce costs. I had never given much thought to how much it takes to staff a news bureau in Iraq, but according to CJR, it’s a lot. In discussing this lengthy package in the New York Times, CJR says:

According to their editor, the writers, Damien Cave and Stephen Farrell, spent more than half of their time for nearly two months on the piece, including a number of days as embeds. Their research was supplemented by the work of twenty-nine other reporters, photographers, videographers, editors, and members of the graphics staff. The foreign editor, Susan Chira, devoted roughly the equivalent of two weeks to the story. Just to maintain a bureau in Iraq these days, between life insurance and blast walls, guards and transportation, guns and generators, takes more than $3 million annually at the Times—plus staff salaries.

This, to me, hits on what I see as the major issue that confronts journalists in our time: How do you make journalism work when budgets are tight? No one knows what the best answer is yet, but the editorial talks about a few other efforts that are interesting.

• ABC News is setting up one-person “micro-bureaus” in places like Rio, Dubai and Jakarta, where reporter-producers will tape and edit their own packages.
• ProPublica, which is something like a nonprofit investigative journalism wire service
• MinnPost, another nonprofit daily news Web site based in Minnesota.

Speaking of things I would like to see in journalism: Why hasn’t anyone taken the muckety approach to covering local news? I think this site is just the neatest idea in Web news I have seen. I think back to all of the boards of selectmen, small towns and insider deals I wrote about, yet had no great way to showcase. The muckety tool would be perfect for it. I am surprised no one else has tried something similar.

Here’s one that takes a look at the connections to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Questioning The AIDS Infection Rate Story

I am troubled by the explanations for a rising number of a new AIDS and HIV infections among young people in a story making the rounds on Yahoo! today.

The story quotes a number of experts who claim the rising infection rates among teens and young adults has to do with an image problem; that is, the perception that AIDS is less serious because there are drugs to treat it. People are living longer with AIDS, and as a result, young people are less afraid.

Experts say a number of factors may be at play, including the fact that many HIV-infected patients are now being kept healthy with powerful drugs — making AIDS seem like less of a threat to young people than it did in the past.

‘Certainly the “scare factor” isn’t there anymore,’ said Rowena Johnston, vice president of research at the Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR) in New York City.

Here’s my problem with that explantion: It’s overly convenient. It assumes that young people are stupid, and cannot gauge the seriousness of AIDS and HIV. The even bigger problem? The story does a poor job fleshing out other ideas and explantions for increased numbers of infections.  

Off the top of my head, I can think of at least three alternative explanations for that increase.

• The rise in abstinence-only education that coincided with the administration of President Bush. The data in the story, you’ll note, compares recent infection rates with those going back to 2001, the year the current administration took office.
• The increasing number of young people. The lede story in USA Today makes a big issue out of the rising number of 20-somethings in this country. Quote: “A larger generation of 20-somethings, an age group more likely than others to move as they attend college, launch their careers or leave their childhood homes. The number of people in their 20s dropped from 40.5 million in 1990 to 38.3 million in 2000 but rebounded to almost 42 million in 2006.” If there are millions more in that age group, one would assume the nunber of new infections would rise on an actual basis, but not on a per capita basis.
• An increase in the availability and efficacy of testing. This was something has been seen with cancers, as technologies like CT scans and PSA tests became more widely used. Are more kids getting tested? Are tests much better than they were five years ago? I don’t know — the story doesn’t say. 

Taibbi Says: Don’t Go To Journalism School

 Thinking about going to journalism school? Check out this advice from Rolling Stone columnist Matt Taibbi.

“If you have no real knowledge or skill set and you’re lazy and full of shit but you want to make a decent wage, then journalism’s not a bad career option. The great thing about it is that you don’t need to know anything. I mean this whole notion of journalism school—I can’t believe people actually go to journalism school. You can learn the entire thing in like three days. My advice is instead of going to journalism school, go to school for something concrete like medicine or some kind of science or something and then use the knowledge you get in that field as a wedge to get yourself into journalism.

What journalism really needs is more people who are reporting who actually know something. Instead of having a bunch of liberal arts grads who’ve read Siddhartha 50 times writing about health care, it would be really nice if some of the people who are writing about health care were doctors.”

I Made Gorkana

My job change landed on Gorkana today. Here’s the copy and paste. 

Insurance Journal
Ken St. Onge has joined Insurance Journal as Associate Editor. Ken, most recently the Managing Editor of the Hartford Business Journal, will cover the property/casualty insurance industry throughout the Northeast region. He can be reached at … Ken will continue to write the “Industrial Strength” column for the Hartford Business Journal through the end of the year. 

How Fortuitous They Were Hiring

I made myself very jealous when I found out last night that Wells Publishing (the company for which I just started working) has been named the second best magazine publishing company to work for in the country by Publishing Executive. It’s especially impressive given some of the names it beat out — Meredith Corp. (Better Homes & Gardens, Family Circle), Rodale (Men’s Health and my favorite magazine, Runner’s World), Time Inc., Reed (Variety), Crain, F+W (Writer’s Digest) and others.

Interesting tidbit: McMurry Inc., which topped the list, is a company that does mostly custom publishing, rather than traditional publishing. The CEO called his company’s win “a sign of the shifting times when the happiest people in publishing are in custom publishing or custom media.”

He’s probably right. A lot of business-to-business publishing companies are getting into the custom publishing business (in a nutshell: advertiser-sponsored, topic-specific magazines, books, Web sites, etc.) because it’s proving to be quite profitable for them and successful for their advertisers. McMurry is among the largest publishers doing that type of work.

Hammering At The Source

Perhaps it’s because I get so much resistance in the day-to-day course of being a reporter that I really enjoy it when a smart journalist takes a subtle whack at a person or company that has thwarted him. Hiawatha Bray has a good example of it in the Globe today. The victim? The one laptop per child program, which apparently refused to cooperate with Bray in a simple comparison with other cheap laptops. Bray handled it pretty well, I think.

(A)re they any good? We figured the best way to find out was with a three-way hands-on showdown. The foundation refused to participate, saying it didn’t have any spare units to lend. It also refused to let us visit the headquarters and run tests.

Too bad. It could have been a contender.

It’s a good, mild potshot at the inanity of public relations methods of groups like the laptop folks. The program goes out of its way to post wikis, send press releases, talk about ethics and “vision”, etc. But when an outsider tries to independently evaluate it? Forget it; they’re not interested.

If the laptop program ever gets off the ground, what will happen down the road when some pesky reporter inevitably starts to dig into whether it was a success? Odds point to resistance, not openness. Some vision that would make…

The Bonds That Tries My Patience

I just finished watching an ESPN broadcast where Peter Gammons, Tim Kurkjian, and several other sportswriters debated whether slugger Barry Bonds deserves to make it into the Baseball Hall of Fame. And I realized what makes me uncomfortable with the Barry Bonds situation: The fact that journalists can actually decide the answer to that question.

Baseball writers are the ones who cast ballots for the hall of fame. This fact baffles me. These are the people who are assigned to cover baseball as a professional reporters; a profession with hallmarks of objectivity, distance and contemplation.

None of those hallmarks is action. In the case of sportswriters, that action is voting.

Many journalists, myself included, do not vote in elections, participate in political activities, march, protest, work on behalf of a partisan group or generally do anything that conveys the impression they maintain a bias.

The sheer fact that journalists vote for the hall of fame puts them in a position inherently at odds with the profession they are paid to do: namely, remain objective observers, above the fray.

Perhaps this point stuck out to me because I was flipping back and forth between C-SPAN and Sportscenter. But the logical similarity is crystal clear in my mind. The difference between a politician and journalist at its core is this: Politicians use argument to justify their actions. Journalists’ arguments by design have no more bite than the insights they carry.

Gammons and crew — discussing why they may vote for Bonds — struck me as grandstanding. Why? They are the actual decision makers, not mere influencers. A journalist should make an argument based on its own merits, not to justify a conclusion.

That’s not to say the writers were wrong to argue about it. The problem is their arguments have real teeth — in this case voting to decide on whether Bonds is admitted to the hall of fame. It’s something wholly unjournalistic.

How can a reporter critique something unobjectively when it’s his own opinion he tries to influence? This is far more akin to propaganda than reporting.

If I ever become a sportswriter, count me out on voting. But I will definitely argue until I am blue in the face.