PressEthic

As shareholders lose patience, The New York Times Company is facing some tough decisions.

The New York Times, continuing its habit of only covering higher education when there's a scandal at an Ivy League School, has the story.

In the 23 November 2006 installment of his weekly blog, Robert X. Cringley argues that Craigslist is the online culprit responsible for the death of the daily newspaper era. Could that darling of online democracy be responsible for such a complex phenomenon?

What if local newspapers stopped printing national and international news? What if smaller newspapers consolidated their already scarce resources to focus on more local news? What if those interested in politics and foreign affairs simply went on online? What if this ceased to be a 'what if' scenario and became reality?

Arianna Huffington created HuffingtonPost.com, "a political website for celebrity bloggers," about 18 months ago. With the growing popularity of the site and major investment from venture capitalists, Huffington has decided to take the next step.

Leroy Sievers, Writer of NPR’s ‘My Cancer’ blog, is expressing concern over something unusual: the number of hits on his page.

Sievens wrote on his site:

“The way we measure how we're doing in journalism is by counting the number of people who watch our work. There are a lot of people who look at the My Cancer blog. And that's good from a business standpoint. But when you stop and think about it, it's actually pretty sad.”

While online journalism provides a daily information source for millions of Americans, an equally crucial attribute of blogs is the public forum they have established, not just for other writers, but for those who stumble upon them as readers. While a personal letter to the editor usually disappeared into the void in pre-internet age, today’s blog and news readers can post an electronic response to a story and see it appear on the page within seconds.

It seems as if FEMA is finally doing the right thing, according to an article on The New York Times' website. Yesterday, FEMA was ordered by judge Richard J. Leon for Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, to restore evacuees' housing aid. This is something that should have been done MONTHS ago, it is extremely unfortunate that the American government has allowed these people to go this long without the emergency shelter they deserved. What has taken so long for action to be taken? In my opinion, it's quite inexcusable for families who have lost everything to continue to struggle not knowing why they've been rejected for housing aid and then not knowing how to appeal the decision.

The immigration debate has its share of lunatic pundits on the far right and the far left. Ruben Navarrette, who occupies neither fringe, annoys me because he so often squanders the prime opinion real estate he's given on columns so poorly reasoned that they often move me to line-by-line refutations.

The recent advent of fat-cat billionaires taking interest in struggling newspapers (if by struggling you mean, profit margins still greater than those of Fortune 500 companies) leaves me to wonder whether private ownership is a good thing for journalists in the newsroom. Would we rather toil under the faceless control of a massive corporation, who's only priority is the profit margin? Or would we rather be under private ownership, running the risk of the owner attempting to meddle in or influence the editorial aspect of the paper?

Pajamas Media

The head of the UK's Press Complaints Commission has called for voluntary adherence to a code of conduct for bloggers.

The son of a Globe columnist calls out his father for not crediting his blog.

To follow up from my previous post on ethical guidelines for when, if at all, it is appropriate for a news organization to 'out' somebody, the Poynter Institute's "Ethics" column covers a recent situation in the news involving a rumor that a Republican senator from Idaho was homosexual. Mike Rogers, a self-titled "journo-activist," posted on his blog that Craig had sex with four men, all of whom were anonymous sources of Rogers. The blog posting isn't really the issue here - there is no proof offered, Rogers will not reveal his sources, and Craig has publicly denied that the statement is true. Where it gets interesting, and relevant for us as journalists is what newspapers decided to do when presented with this story. Do we run it, or kill it? Is it true? Is it newsworthy?

Once again, journalism raises its head as the fourth estate.

Various news outlets are reporting that President Bush’s scheduled conference with Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki has been unexpectedly canceled. Most of the reports agree that a secret White House memo published today in the New York Times was a factor in Maliki’s decision to call off the meeting.

The White House, however, denies the memo’s alleged impact.

NPR reported today:

“Mr. Bush arrived in Jordan Wednesday evening, local time. He was to sit down with the Iraqi Prime Minister and the Jordanian King shortly thereafter. Instead came an announcement that the session would proceed without Maliki.

Trend pieces are notorious for running on the power of a few amazing quotes, exclusive scenes, and the appeal of the story to excite readers. Throwing sex and teenagers into the mix makes the story even juicier– even if the facts are, at best, shaky. And that, of course, is the problem with trend pieces as city of Baltimore is slowly realizing about a batch of stories that reported the supposed popularity of so-called “sex parties.”