The Press Gazette in London just folded after 41 years. Its Fleet Street 2.0 blog will live on at Martin Stabe’s place.
Posts from November 2006
Not in sync
Chris Riley builds a neat little page that compares, side-by-side, what the BBC thinks we should care about vs. what we actually care about — that is, the BBC’s home-page placement against the most popular stories and subjects. Now I know that some will warn that we shouldn’t make news just a matter of ratings. I hear that all the time: Then the news would be overrun by tawdry celebrity gossip. Well, it is already. And note that the stop story over the last two weeks on both sides of the equation is Iraq, not Tomkat. That’s No. 2.
Blue Bird returns
Back in 2003, I discovered a blog called Blue Bird Escapes, by a terribly talented young writer in Virginia who returned to her native Iran and wrote an eloquently frank and open diary sharing her views about trying to cross between the two worlds (dig in about here). I just got email from the writer, Elaheh Farmand, now a college freshman, sharing the news that she was published in the Washington Post. The challenge was to write about your life in 100 words or less. And here is what she wrote, as eloquent as ever:
I come from Tehran and no, there are no camels where I come from. There are cars and honking taxis that pass women in black veils or short, colorful scarves that barely cover their heads. In this beautiful prison of banned dreams, there certainly isn’t a statue of liberty; men and women liberate themselves with cafes, cigars, smuggled drugs and secret relationships. In America, I am a writer. I can imagine, dream, live, breathe as an Iranian, an American. I can add color to anything; if only I could paint the gray streets of Tehran with my words.
WKRP, the stalking turkey for the radio industry
So I saw that the Guardian is going to syndicate the viral video chart (which I blogged when it launched and to which I return frequently). And so I saw that the WKRP Thanksgiving episode was No. 2 and I got to show it to my son, the Seinfeld fan. What a classic.
PC Times
Two Three stories in today’s Times grated on me like fingernails on a whiteboard (updated allusion).
The first chronicles a so-what tale of a two-bit criminal who stole a mean and then whines about spending a day washing dishes. Why the hell should be care? She broke the law. She served a sentence. She barely gives a damn. Go read the story and tell me what is in the least bit newsworthy about this?
The second is Anita Gates’ review of an American Girl movie that tries to make support for World War II look like a politically incorrect subversive attempt to support the Iraq War, one that requires parental instruction:
Then there’s the war. Granted, this is World War II, the one that even protesters in the Vietnam era could see as “the good war,” totally justified and noble. But it may seem to some viewers that Molly’s lessons in the necessity of the ultimate sacrifice are meant to persuade young viewers to see the current war in Iraq as equally noble.Parents can talk to their children about that issue and then safely allow them to enjoy “Molly” for what it mostly is, a heartwarming, dreamlike vision of American small-town life six decades ago, with universal lessons around every corner.
Well, thank you very much for the permission.
And then I just saw Clyde Haberman’s column (behind the barbed wire) trying to tie Christmas shopping, 9/11, and Iraq together in a construction even more contorted than the White House’s.
No day is better for this display of patriotism than Black Friday, so named because retailers pray for ledgers written in ink of that color. Many signs suggest that New Yorkers are ready to do their part.Few of them may have turned out on Nov. 11 to watch the Veterans Day parade in the city. The crowds lining the parade route on Fifth Avenue were sparser than Knicks victories.
But New Yorkers more than held their own a few days later by gathering in vast herds outside stores selling the Sony PlayStation 3.
This may be one time when you should be glad you can’t get behind the TimesSelect wall.
Were the editors all off having turkey yesterday? Apparently so. And the paper got the stuffing.
Holiday
Should I have put up a post warning of light posting over the holiday? Naw.
Another newspaper prognostication
Michael Hirschorn has a good column in The Atlantic on one of my favorite subjects — Whither newspapers? — singing harmony with much of what I say here.
Meanwhile, top reporters and columnists at major newspapers are realizing (or will realize soon) that their fates are not necessarily tied to those of their employers. As portals and search engines and blogs increasingly allow readers to consume media without context or much branding, writers like Thomas Friedman will increasingly wonder what is the benefit of working for a newspaper–especially when the newspaper is burying his article behind a subscriber wall. It will require only a slight shift in the economic model for the Friedmans of the world to realize that they don’t need the newspapers they work for; that they can go off and blog on their own, or form United Artists-like cooperatives to financially support their independent efforts. . . .Not only do you allow your reporters to blog; you make them the hubs of their own social networks, the maestros of their own wikis, the masters of their own many-to-many realms. . . .
But he comes around to an optimistic ending for print.
