‘Cross My Palm With Silver, You Can Publish My Essay’

Harlan Ellison wants to be paid, man.

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.

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.”

Writers strike propaganda. OK.  

Random written thought of the day…

Discomforting writing advice of the day, courtesy of Ernest Hemingway:

“The first draft of anything is sh*t”

 

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.