The Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio)

The Leaf Chronicle (Clarksville, Tennessee)

The Vindicator (Youngstown, Ohio)

The Log Cabin Democrat (Conway, Arkansas)

The Truth (Elkhart, Indiana)

… knowing full well that some of the people they handed it to were journalists who would blog about it, as I did here on my work blog. I give this stunt an ‘A’ for effort.

I got a Wednesday Times and you can’t have it! People are bidding $50 for them on eBay.

Thinking about the fact that a black guy just won the presidency, nerds are back in charge of the executive branch, and newspapers are suddenly cool again, it seemed a good time to leaf through my box of important front pages. See below… (more…)

“All static, all day, forever!” – Channel Z by The B-52’s

This election season, I picked up an odd habit. At the gym in the mornings, I’ve started watching Fox & Friends. I’m totally obsessed with this show. I know, weird.

Fox & Friends is beamed from a newsroom in another galaxy where everybody is batshit, spit-flying, crazypants. There is an election happening in this parallel universe, but it bears no resemblance to any election happening on planet Earth. For one thing, there only seems to be one candidate.

This candidate, Fox & Friends tells us, is a closet socialist, a terrorist sympathizer and a con artist. His head is so clouded by messianic ambition that he spins outrageous lies about his own tax plan. An endless loop of talking heads appears via satellite every morning to denounce him as a conniving snake. But alas, everyone agrees this candidate is predestined to win, thanks to the all-powerful and all-biased mainstream media. His opponent is practically irrelevant, seldom mentioned, never pictured.

Occasionally, the Fox & Friends storyline drifts from this villainous character to the world’s only other news story – The War. In this war, proud generals strut through hallways, helicopters fly low over sand-hued cityscapes, and important men shake hands. A well-oiled defense machine hums with purposeful confidence. It is a great war. May it never end.

I have been trying to psychoanalyze why I find Fox & Friends such compelling television. For one thing, it is broadcast live and has shockingly sloppy production, so watching for goofs is part of the fun. It also stokes my ego when I realize I know more about the news than a professional news anchor. But those are superficial satisfactions. Bottom line, I think it helps me exercise better. As I watch this show on the elliptical or the treadmill, I am thinking: I have to be faster, smarter, stronger and better than the schlubs who take Fox & Friends seriously. I owe that to my country.

So thank you Steve, Brian, Gretchen, and friends for helping me stay fit!

Below, please enjoy some Fox & Friends video from this morning’s show – a conversation about the rich and the poor that practically could have been written by Joseph Heller.

(more…)

I am scared. Amid all the media layoffs we’ve seen this quarter, the two most troubling ones happened in the last week: Radar magazine folded and sold its Web domain to AMI (to be re-branded as a celebrity site), and Portfolio scaled back and basically gutted its Web staff.

Why do I single out these two smallish, New York-centric publications? Because Radar and Portfolio had kick-ass Web sites. Good writers, smart design, lots of breaking exclusives, and a trustworthy reputation that led other sites to link to them and drive in quality traffic. They did everything right. And from what I understand, they drew big numbers from demographics that ought to have appealed to advertisers. The fact that neither Radar Online nor Porfolio.com was sustainable totally crushes the idea that media companies can succeed by publishing content for free online.

But online journalism makes so much sense! It’s cheap and easy to do! There’s an obvious, and growing, demand for it! And even if it loses money now, online advertising will save us! It just needs a couple of years to catch up.

That was my die-hard belief until I read a very persuasive post by Henry Boldget on Silicon Alley Insider: Let’s Be Serious: Online Display Ads Will Fall Sharply In 2009.

I have been chewing on that idea over the last few days as I’ve watched one publisher after another slash their editorial staffs. While print staffs are getting hit hardest, online staffs are not protected by some halo of future projections. They’re getting axed, too.

What if everything we think we know about online advertising is wrong? What if we’ve deluded ourselves into thinking that just because something is fun and useful, it also must be a good business? What if this is as good as it gets?

Happy Halloween!

Check out this opinion column on ABCNews.com: Media’s Presidential Bias and Decline. Which of the following do you suppose is true?

- Michael Malone has just discovered – gee whiz! – this thing called media bias, somehow having never read any serious critique of political journalism. As such, he’s reduced to borrowing tired ideas from right-wing blogs.

- Michael Malone lives in a place where the only newspaper he can get is The New York Times and the only TV network he can receive is CNN International. He has no access to The Wall Street Journal, Fox News, AM radio, Lou Dobbs, or The Drudge Report.

- Michael Malone (”one of the nation’s best-known technology writers”) doesn’t know the names of any other journalists, or for some reason is afraid to name them.

- Michael Malone is a time-traveler from some film-noir version of the 1950s… When journalists were journalists their whole lives, working for one newspaper their entire career, praying the wouldn’t be dispatched to the dreaded Omaha bureau… When mysterious and all-powerful editors pulled the puppet-strings and never answered to publishers, corporate chains, or budget constraints… When everyone who used cocaine obtained it from a drug dealer… When the expression “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable” wasn’t so clichéd (as it is now) that even the laziest journalism professors consider it trite and shallow.

- The hundreds of people who have posted supportive comments of Malone’s column on ABCNews.com are free of bias.

In the elevator at work yesterday, I had a chance run-in with somebody I knew from college. She doesn’t even work in my building; she was visiting from Virginia. This person was one of my editors at the school paper, and I got to thinking about how I learned to be a reporter.

At the student newspaper, we had a huge volunteer staff. Everything I wrote was read by five editors. When I went out and reported from the field on a late deadline, I could call back to the office and read my notes to somebody over the phone, who would type them into a story. When big news broke, it wasn’t unusual to have ten reporters on a story. There were more photographers and graphic artists on the staff than the newspaper could possibly use; most were lucky to get one assignment a week. It was, in a word, awesome.

I knew that when I graduated and worked for a professional publication, personnel would be in shorter supply. But I was prepared to work as part of a team.

Things are different now. The job of a journalist is changing, in many cases disappearing. At my job now at a business magazine, I’m basically the only online news person. I still do as much reporting as I did when I worked at a newspaper. But now most of my stories are read by only one editor before they go live; some are read by nobody. There is no online copy editor. I mostly handle my own photos and graphics. I write a blog. I shoot and edit videos. I solve computer problems. I crunch our Web stats. I make my own travel arrangements. It’s a good job, but one that requires skills far beyond what I learned in journalism school.

The reason journalists are being asked to do so much more isn’t just budgetary. It’s that there’s more demand for online content: A new, hungry beast to feed. It’s going to keep heading in this direction. Is journalism sustainable online, where no one will pay for content? I think so – Web advertising is getting ready to explode, just watch. But the new media world requires everybody to work a little harder and be a little better.

After work today I’m going to go climb the outside of The New York Times building.

I’m hoping to climb all the way to the top, where I will claim a corner office! Anybody want to come along?

Apologies for two work-related posts in a row, but I worked hard on this story and I’d like to share it:

Who Murdered Trent Keegan?

Feedback and criticism welcome.