The Kicker

  1. May 9, 2012 12:31 PM

    9 newsroom buyouts at the Hartford Courant (updated)

    First, a disclosure: I have a soft spot for the Hartford Courant. It’s my hometown daily. I interned there twice during college, and they later hired me for two freelance stints when I was between jobs. As an intern, back in 2006 and then 2007, the newsroom was an inspiring place—Matthew Kauffman and Lisa Chedekel won a Dart Award for their series about mentally ill soldiers who were redeployed, and I sat among career reporters talented enough to work at the biggest publications but who chose to remain in Connecticut, working for “America’s Oldest Continuously Published Newspaper.”

    Things have changed since then.

    The Courant—owned by Tribune since 2000, when the Chicago-based company merged with then-owner, Times Mirror—was caught in the fallout from Tribune’s bankruptcy in late 2008. The newsroom has shrunk from some 400 employees 15 years ago to fewer than 150 today.

    The most recent buyout offer, which expired last week, has resulted in the loss of nine more newsroom staffers, including rock critic Eric Danton, columnist Susan Campbell, night editor Nancy Gallinger, reporter Mark Spencer, reader-submitted articles editors Mary Wilson and Sandra James, newsroom assistant Lynne Maston, and sports reporter Shawn Courchesne. I don’t know who the ninth person is, or whether this buyout will be enough to avert layoffs. (update: I'm told the nine employees won't know officially if their buyout requests are accepted until Friday.)

    The buyout was offered to the finance, advertising, circulation and print-side departments, but not Web staff or the TV staff from FOX CT, which took over a sizable chunk of the newsroom in 2009. (When the newsroom was renovated to include a TV studio, old carpeting was replaced everywhere except beneath the print reporters’ cubicles, creating a stark, visual line between the new and the no-longer-valued.)

    The writing would seem to be on the wall for the paper whose staff quasi-affectionately calls it "Mother Courant." But I can't help hoping, magical thinking though it may be, that the paper that made me want to be a journalist will somehow continue its tradition of great reporting through the digital shift and despite its negligent ownership.

  2. May 8, 2012 10:36 AM

    Who you calling ‘working-class’?

    Attention all political reporters and editors. If you don’t know about the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State, in Ohio, I urge you to bookmark its blog (Working-Class Perspectives) and check it frequently as the primary campaign unfolds. Below is a sampling of the latest, directed squarely at you, from John Russo, who runs the center. Read the full post here.

    Most journalists covering electoral politics define the working class as those without a college education. That definition is widely used, not only by reporters but also by some scholars and political analysts, in part because it’s easy to measure. I caution reporters that if they use this definition, then the working class seems to be shrinking as more people attend college. While some commentators have suggested that this shift makes the working class less important politically, I argue that this is simply a statistical shift. These days, many working-class people have at least some college education, and the working class continues to matter in American politics. In part because of that, I try to help journalists understand why class is not just a matter of education. It also has to do with occupation, income, wealth, and - among the hardest aspects to measure - culture.


    At the same time, I remind reporters that class is not the only identity that might affect how people view political candidates and issues. For example, white working-class men might well view economic and policy issues differently from white working-class women or black working-class men. I also try to help journalists understand that the working-class varies politically by region and state, in part because other issues, like race and types of employment, shape working-class cultures. When we add religious affiliations and social values, things become even more complicated, but that’s the point. I want to encourage reporters to get beyond their assumptions and stereotypes when they write about working-class voters and issues.


  3. May 8, 2012 06:55 AM

    Watch: CJR’s panel on digital press freedoms

    In honor of its 50th birthday, CJR’s southern presence expanded Monday beyond its one-man DC bureau, as editors and fellow journalists converged at the Newseum for a panel event titled “Truth and consequences: free expression and independent journalism in a digital world.”

    The panel, moderated by NPR’s Robert Siegel, included: Columbia University president Lee Bollinger (during the event, CJR inadvertently @-tweeted what I hope is the scholar’s fake account), Voice of America’s David Ensor, Thomson Reuters Digital editor Chrystia Freeland, and Rebecca MacKinnon.

    “Times change, and now we face changes that raise questions unlike any I can recall, questions like, ‘who gets to control whose articles pop up in the search engine when you plug a word in?’” Siegel said, before opening the floor to the panelists. “Who gets to monitor whose digital communications? Who figures out how to continue to make money from the enterprise of journalism in a culture of getting things for free and making perfect digital copies of whatever is out there?”

    Watch the event online here.

    Recent, related coverage:

    Staying safe: CPJ’s “Journalist Security Guide” is a must-read

    Beyond encryption: hold the phone! And other security strategies

    Encryption is your friend: four easy ways to protect yourself and your sources

    Freelancers on the front lines: safety for foreign correspondents is an issue the media needs to address


  4. May 7, 2012 11:53 AM

    Thank you, Mr. Trillin …

    Easily the smartest thing connected with The New York Times Magazine’s tedious essay contest on the ethics of eating meat came not within the confines of the contest itself, but in Public Editor Art Brisbane’s column about the contest. Brisbane asked Calvin Trillin—an omnivore of great gusto and renown—to send an essay about why it’s okay to eat animals.

    Trillin needed only nine of the 600 words Bisbane offered: “If they had a chance, they would eat us.”

  5. May 7, 2012 11:43 AM

    Beyonce’s no Girl Friday

    The New York Association of Black Journalists is hearing from the media (social and otherwise) about the decision to award a journalism prize to singer Beyonce Knowles at its awards ceremony next week.

    Knowles is being honored for her July 2011 Essence cover story, “Eat, Play, Love,” about taking a break from her grueling work schedule to travel and relax. It’s a shallow piece of dubious journalistic merit beyond the draw of its famous byline. A representative quotation:

    I had no schedule while taking in the sites of Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and my favorite Aussie city, Sydney. They have the best restaurants and the harbor is awesome. It was a carefree existence for me.

    “We had to edit her, but everyone gets edited except Toni Morrison," Essence’s entertainment director told the New York Daily News. (I wonder what preceded descriptors like “awesome.”)

    Diction aside, the piece is devoid of any sense of the singer’s interiority. She relates details of her far-flung travels but never pauses to reflect on any spiritual or emotional growth spurred by her frequent-flier miles.

    It’s the magic of words to images to deeper meanings that produces the first-person pieces readers dog-ear and keep by their beds. I’m not saying Beyonce should be Joan Didion, or that she shouldn’t have written the Essence piece. But in bestowing its awards, the NYABJ should have considered good work ahead of publicity.

  6. May 4, 2012 12:32 PM

    What’s Slate been up to?

    It's been more than a year since we profiled Slate for CJR's Guide to Online News Startups (then the News Frontier Database). Since then, the grandfather of Internet magazines lost Jack Shafer and Timothy Noah to layoffs, but also had its share of good news: the site finally transitioned away from the CMS it had been using for 10 years and, most significantly, broke away from The Washington Post's ad sales department to form its own sales and marketing team.

    Luckily, much of what distinguished Slate editorially remains the same, particularly the magazine's commitment to long-form storytelling.

    Read more about happenings at Slate in our updated profile, and check out other recently added and updated profiles of online news startups throughout the country at the Guide's homepage.
  7. May 4, 2012 10:16 AM

    NYT’s hockey series gets Dart Award

    The NYT’s series on the life and death of hockey enforcer Derek Boogaard won a Dart Award last night (WNYC’s excellent “Living 9/11” documentary also won). John Branch and company’s multimedia report, which was published in December, was an example of the kind of ambitious—I would say crusading, though the Times would never call it that—reporting that has been cropping up in the Sports section more frequently in recent years. Starting in 2007, Alan Schwarz’s articles, which almost single-handedly forced the NFL to confront the problem of head injuries, seemed to open a welcome new chapter in the paper’s approach to sports. The Boogaard series was riveting and heart-breaking, but so far hasn’t spurred the kind of ongoing coverage, or conversation, about hockey that Schwarz’s articles did about football. Here’s hoping that it still will.

  8. May 4, 2012 06:56 AM

    National Mag Awards announced

    The American Society of Magazine Editors announced this year's National Magazine Awards at a black-tie ceremony Thursday night.

    Time netted the top award, for magazine of the year. Other big winners included Bloomberg Businessweek for general excellence and the New Yorker for reporting. Vanity Fair won for columns and commentary for pieces by the late Christopher Hitchens.

    See the complete list of winners and finalists here.

  9. April 27, 2012 03:28 PM

    Two cheers for the FCC

    Update, 6 p.m.: ProPublica's Justin Elliott reports that stations in the top 50 markets will have to start posting files 30 days after the Office of Management and Budget approves the new rule. FCC spokesman Janice Wise said the FCC does not expect OMB approval to take long.

    Original Story: Will bluebirds sing us awake every morning after Lincoln-Douglas-quality presidential debates enlighten us every evening? Will the fierce grip of money and power over our politics and policy be seriously diminished?

    Perhaps not. But two cheers anyway for Friday’s Federal Communications Commissions vote to require local television stations to post political advertising data online. It is a good step toward transparency in the realm of money and politics, allowing some citizens to know who is paying (and how much they are paying) for the political advertisements that will soon flood their airways, particularly in swing states. The commission voted 2-1 to institute the new rules, despite serious industry opposition.

    As David Firestone wrote on NYTimes.com today, partially quoting from today’s Times editorial,

    That database will allow the public to see which secretive political groups are paying for ads, how much they are paying, and where the ads are running. In a political season that has been polluted with unlimited campaign contributions paying for dishonest attack ads, the vote for disclosure will “help the public get a far broader sense of the powerful financial forces driving today’s politics.”

    Some caveats:

    —The rules apply only to affiliates of the four major networks in the 50 largest markets. The rest of the stations have until July 2014 to comply.

    —As ProPublica reported right after the vote, “the data will not be searchable or uploaded in a common format,” which will make it more difficult to analyze the information.

    —It is not clear yet—at least to us—when these rules will take effect, though hopefully soon enough to matter in the current cycle. We’ll find out.

    As regular readers know, CJR has been following this since Steve Waldman, a fomer advisor to the FCC, first wrote about it for us in December. We expect to write more about what this can mean for journalists and their readers and viewers in coming days.

    Meanwhile, a tip of the hat to journalists who have been digging out political advertising information the old fashioned way and putting it online, such as WCNC in Charlotte, NC. That station’s I-team scanned documents from Charlotte’s four major stations—including itself—and put it all on a spreadsheet online.

  10. April 26, 2012 11:09 AM

    Nikki Haley Strikes a Pose

    The intersecting sliver of the “Tea Party”-“Vogue” Venn diagram would seem to be a razor-thin one, but the latest politician to receive characteristic puff-piece treatment from the fashion magazine is Tea Party darling (circa 2010)-turned-South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who is described in those glossy pages as “fit and attractive, with a face free of worry lines.”

    The profile, titled “New Horizons,” happens to coincide with the release of Haley’s memoir, which itself coincides with—ah, yes—the start of the Veepstakes. (The Kicker hopes this lucky timing turns out better for Vogue than when it released its glowing profile of Syrian First Lady Asma al-Assad right before the regime began a violent crackdown on anti-government protesters. Vogue unpublished the piece and still refuses to discuss it.)

    Nikki Haley's own reputation—as a conservative, small-government stalwart—went out the window when she endorsed that Massachusetts moderate, Mitt Romney. South Carolina Tea Partiers might argue she turned in her tea bag long before that, and she probably won’t win back skeptics with the Vogue spread. She’s photographed looking sharp in sumptuous surroundings, which is enough to stir any fashion-conscious conservative’s memories of that Sarah Palin-for-Veep, Nieman Marcus shopping spree.

    Nor has the magazine's high-fashion, airbrushed touch exactly turned its recent subjects into political gold: besides al-Assad, Haley follows in the footsteps of Jon Huntsman, the lamest pony in the Republican horse race.

    Careful readers will notice the Vogue story makes an allusion to 'Sic Willie,' the South Carolina blogger we profiled in January.

  11. April 25, 2012 03:53 PM

    Murdoch vs. Muto

    Let me get this straight: Even as Rupert Murdoch’s media empire remains under official scrutiny for an allegedly extensive phone-hacking scandal, News Corp.-owned Fox News is going after a former employee for leaking internal information.

    That former employee is “Fox News Mole,” Joe Muto, who had been leaking inside details about Fox to Gawker (reportedly for money), but who lasted about two days before a digital trail led to his termination earlier this month. During his brief anonymity, he revealed breaking details about Fox’s dingy bathrooms and old computers.

    That sort of leak, apparently, is taboo in Murdochland—Muto tweeted early this morning that the New York County District Attorney’s office raided his apartment on a search warrant, posted by Gawker this afternoon. But flouting news ethics are A-OK at News Corp. As Harold Evans opines in a piece today for wife Tina Brown’s website, The Daily Beast:

    There is a pattern to the Murdoch sagas. He responds to serious criticism by a biting wisecrack or diversionary personal attack. What is denied most sharply invariably turns out to irrefutably true.

    Evans also drops the scoop that Murdoch met with Margaret Thatcher just before his 1981 bid for The Times of London was approved, over that of an identical in-house offer and despite its breaking Britain’s anti-monopoly laws.

    But back to poor Joe Muto, who hasn’t tweeted since this morning, which may mean he retained representation. He wrote:

    Those other things include petit larceny and computer tampering; the charges are based on allegations that Muto took and shared content from Fox's servers. As things appear to stand, Murdoch’s company is trying to ruin one peon while pretending its monarch will emerge blameless.

  12. April 22, 2012 05:28 PM

    ProPublica is fundraising with journo tees

    Love journalism enough to wear it? ProPublica is currently running a fundraising campaign on Selfless Tee, a San Francisco-based company that works with organizations to design and sell shirts. Then, they split the profits.

    For the next nine days, $22 (plus shipping and handling) can snag journo-geeks a gray t-shirt that reads “journalism with moral force,” designed around a cartoon Girl Friday busily typing. ProPublica gets $7 per shirt.

    The online journalism outlet hopes to net $1,000 from the campaign, and it’s about halfway there already. There are also social media-related goals for the fundraiser—ProPublica seeks 500 Facebook “likes” and 300 tweets about its foray into fashion. ProPublica already has more than 120,000 Twitter followers, about 31,500 Facebook fans, and two Pulitzer Prizes, so its Selfless Tee campaign is neither ambitious nor promoted prominently on its website.

    Regardless, with this shirt and the pale blue “house that Pulitzer built” tee marking Columbia Journalism School’s centennial, you’ve got the beginnings of one solid media clothing collection. You’re welcome.

  13. April 16, 2012 02:53 PM

    Katie Roiphe’s Click Bait Win is a Discourse Fail

    Among the clusters of folks I follow on Twitter—media critics, yoga bloggers, friends—the group that’s consistently most entertaining is the feminist journalists (sorry, friends). One of my favorite Internet things is their reaction to any public assertion that can be construed as anti-woman. The feminist journos commence intelligently snarking the original comment until they overtake the original narrative (disclosure: I usually agree with them). Much of the news I read nowadays I seek thanks to a desire to understand the Twitter jokes.

    Recent examples have been the Ann Romney/Hilary Rosen flap—which turned from GOP tsk-tsking at a liberal commentator for saying stay-at-home mom Ann Romney has never worked into a conversation about how Romney’s wealth enables her the luxury of choosing not to seek employment—and the Virginia bill that would have mandated invasive ultrasounds prior to abortions. Then, this morning’s Newsweek cover story appeared, and it was by Katie Roiphe.

    Roiphe, a professor at NYU’s journalism school, likes to write pieces arguing about things like how the book "Go the F**k to Sleep" reflects the sexual frustration of modern parents and how sexual harassment is pretend. Gawker’s reaction to new Roiphe pieces is often some incarnation of “why won’t she shut up?” Her latest piece asserts there is a cultural obsession with female sexual submission stemming from women’s discomfort with their power in the workplace. (It was published by Tina Brown, one of the most powerful women in any workplace. Let’s leave that one alone, since Brown’s propensity for publishing attention-grabbing work likely overrules the “I’m asking for a friend” thing.)

    Enter the tweeters!

    When these tweets appeared in my feed, I sought out Roiphe’s essay, “Spanking Goes Mainstream.” She uses the old “three examples makes a trend” newspaper trick, arguing that a popular erotic novel, a sex scene in a new TV show and a forthcoming film with a spanking scene prove that young women, uncomfortable with power in the public sphere, crave domination in the private one. “It may be,” Roiphe writes, “that, for some, the more theatrical fantasies of sexual surrender offer a release, a vacation, an escape from the dreariness and hard work of equality.”

    Those three cultural instances, along with allusions to related writing penned in past decades, don’t add up to a supported argument that today’s young women can’t handle gender parity. But the story, along with the cover photo of a topless, blindfolded woman, does create a tabloidesque sensationalism which does a disservice to the storied newsweekly. There’s plenty of women’s issues bubbling in US political life that could use more analysis, rather than this inflammatory click bait.

  14. April 16, 2012 06:00 AM

    Super PACs at the State Level: A Different Story

    Spending by super PACs and other independent groups in 2012 federal races is readily available at websites like OpenSecrets.org and the Sunlight Foundation’s “Follow the Unlimited Money” page. (For more on how to track that spending, see here.)

    But that’s not necessarily the case for super PAC spending in state races—even though the amount of cash those groups lay out may turn out to be sizable. After all, donors to today’s super PACs have in the past played a major role in state-level races. According to a report by the National Institute on Money in State Politics, “an examination of individuals and companies that gave at least $25,000 to super PACs in 2011 shows that these same contributors gave a whopping $36.8 million to state campaigns during the 2008-2010 elections.”

    But it may be months before reporters have access to much data on that spending, according to the institute’s Edwin Bender. That’s because super PACs have largely focused on federal races so far—but also because states’ reporting deadlines are generally much later than federal ones.

    “Late, fragmented and non-existent reporting are all problems at the state level,” he added. “If super PACs are going to play at the state level, we’re not going to find out until later, and it will probably happen in a very different way than in congressional or presidential races.”

    When that spending does start, what might it look like? The sheer number of candidates in down-ballot races—more than 16,000 in legislative and gubernatorial battles in some years—has often precluded outside groups from getting involved, Bender said. But when they do get in, the spending is highly prioritized.

    "We know already that the Chamber of Commerce is going to focus on state races for attorney general, believing that whoever wins will be key to state challenges to things like environmental regulation or the implementation of health-care reforms. That’s just a few dozen races," he explained.

    "They also have targeted gubernatorial campaigns, again assuming the top of the ticket will be a good return on investment,” he added. “And judicial races will be targeted because the interests behind super PACs believe they can get judges friendly to their causes elected, another good return on investment."

    But Bender said it's unlikely we'll see outside groups spending on slates of state legislative candidates. "If a super PAC were to weigh into state-level elections at the level they have in federal races, I think the threat of a backlash is very real."

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