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Via the McClatchy VP Howard Weaver's blog, Etaoin Shrdlu , I was stirred by the report on a column in the Macon Telegraph by Editorial Page Editor Charles Richardson, Why We Do What We Do . Richardson, responding to attacks on his paper for printing the wonderful McClatchy Washington Bureau report on the detainees at Guantánamo , accusing the editors of being 'unpatriotic': We are afraid some of our readers have a stilted view of our constitutional duty. But first a little history. Our country was founded as a nation of laws. ...Should the American press emulate the history of the former Soviet Union's Information Telegraph Agency of Russia, better known as TASS? Should the American press become the propaganda arm of the government such as "The Attack" newspaper in Nazi Germany, set up by the Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels? Is that what our founders had in mind? Thank you, Mr. Richardson.

(An occasional reminiscence on the events of 1968 ) Since Dr. Martin Luther King's murder in April, investigators had been following a trail of a man who seemed to have been following King, and went by the name of Eric Stavro Galt. Although information linked him to King's murder in Memphis, it was three months before he was finally caught. Police in London arrested him June 8 at Heathrow Airport, where he was trying to leave the UK with a Canadian passport under the name of Ramon George Sneyd. James Earl Ray was extradited to Tennessee and charged with King's assassination. He would confess in 1969 and be sentenced to 99 years in prison. He later recanted the confession and was supported in his effort for a retrial by King's family. 40 years later questions about James Earl Ray linger , Atlanta Journal Constitution. On June 10, Gen. Creighton Abrams replaced William Westmoreland as military commander in Vietnam. At Walter Reed Army Hospital, former president Dwight...

From Howard Owens: Spare me the fancy redesigns and give me some text to read . Among the gems: Spare me the big graphics and four-column photos and color splashes. Stop trying to turn your print front page into a web page. ...If they want timeliness, they’ll go online. ...News isn’t about a demographic (as in, “How do we target women, age 24 to 35, with one child and two cats?”) ...The print product should provide context and a moment’s respite. The online product should say, “this is what is happening now.” ...Try digging into your archives and looking at your newspaper from 1971. Make your 2008 paper look like that. You know, this sounds nearly right to me. I want the background and the ads (and comics, and recipes) from the paper that I get delivered by mail late in the day, and don't expect it to give me breaking news. But I also don't want briefs about national/international stories I already know about. I need the local news, the analysis, the interesting stories about p...

The question of journalists and blogging has been debated for years, and I've linked to lots and lots of stuff on the topic. There's so much now that I don't usually link to it, but once in awhile I notice something that stands out. Today, it's a posting by Roy Greenslade, Why journalists must learn the values of the blogging revolution . He raises some interesting ideas: I have tended to predict that future news organisations will consist of a small hub of "professional journalists" at the centre with bloggers (aka amateur journalists/citizen journalists) on the periphery. In other words, us pros will still run the show. I'm altogether less certain about that model now. First, I wonder whether us pros are as valuable as we think. Second, and more fundamentally, I wonder whether a "news organisation" is as perfect a model as we might think. On a related note, I noticed another journalist/blogger spat going on in Asheville NC, where a local blogge...

Hmm. This is why I stopped doing my Miami Herald blog two years ago when they dropped my post-retirement freelance contract. Things must be different now, since Brayden Simms , who announced his own layoff in a column, says he's being paid to blog -- on life after layoff. It's not news, since Gawker and The Guardian , among others, have linked to Brayden's blog. But I just noticed a mention on Daily Pulp , who says: ...hey, if you're gonna fire a guy, might as well exploit him on his way out. ... Still a little weird and shameless on the newspaper's part.

Gene Weingarten writes that the recent Washington Post buyouts haven't affected his written product, at all: Yanks Thump Sox . (Thanks to Doug Fisher .) Note the version with errors noted finds more than I would ever have caught in a hurry.....

Some more interesting thoughts on news research and other topics... In the Wall Street Journal by Jason Fry, The Case of the Missing White Pages (link fixed). It explores the question of whether there is a directory of cell phone numbers (a question that comes up on NewsLib about once a year). A few years back there was news one was coming, but according to this story, Intelius gave up on it. Cell phone users don't want strangers getting their numbers, end of story. But it raises some interesting thoughts: That will arouse uneasy feelings that technology has once again done away with something we assumed was eternal...Those of us who remember looking ourselves up in the white pages and thinking that now we belong to a place may lament -- not for the first time -- that our real-world communities are becoming more fragmented as people spend time in online communities of their own choosing instead. (Via Resourceshelf.) Mentioned in Derek Willis' report on some sessions he attende...

I've been following the coverage of the announced layoffs at the Miami Herald , of course, and am struck by a few things: The first online version of the story, which I read right away, didn't include this part: (those leaving)...include 12 newsroom supervisors, five in the International Edition, two copy editors, three reporters, four designers and layout specialists, two on the state desk, two critics, two photographers and six in archiving and calendar. Archiving, calendar and the International Edition will be outsourced to workers in India. I'm not sure, but this may be a first. I haven't heard of another paper outsourcing library functions (the calendar staff was in the library, too). More on the Herald, of course, at Herald Watch . More at Daily Pulp . And there's good stuff at Random Pixels , where names are named here and here . I'm quite sad to hear about Phil Long, 40-year Herald employee who was my phone buddy for years when he was out on a story so...

Sad to see that the Online Journalism Review , a staple of my reading since I started blogging, is going away , and that Robert Niles has left the Annenberg School at UC. Niles has been a guide for many years and has been at OJR there for a couple, now. At least Niles is starting a new blog, Sensible Talk . It's saddening to click on an old friend to read something really interesting (this report, about McClatchy's fabled Washington Bureau ) and find bad news like this.

I haven't had much time to blog lately but did pick up some good reference sites last week, so here they are, in no particular order: GDP by State . latest release from Bureau of Economic Analysis. Legal Dockets Online has added searches of property, liens, and recorded documents. Subscription service. Economic Impact Study of Completing the Appalachian Development Highway System from Appalachian Regional Commission. OPEC Revenues Fact Sheet from EIA. Terrorism: Locating sources of information , webliography from Assn of College & Research Libraries. Glassdoor : new site provides company ratings, exec salaries and reviews, on 2000 companies so far. Search 2006-2007 crime data for U.S. cities (100,000 or greater population) database from Detroit Free Press. Congressional Research Service (CRS) Reports searchable compilation of all online CRS resources, from Internet Archive's Archive-IT. Rep. Dennis Kucinich's Articles of Impeachment against George W. Bush . Online ...

It's really good news to see ProPublica go live. It's the new independent investigative reporting site started by former Wall St. Journal editor Paul Steiger, and has been eagerly anticipated. In just a few minutes of looking around I'm impressed with the twice-daily Breaking on the Web update links to new investigative stories, a good place to get caught up on the news. I found links here to a couple interesting stories I didn't seen scrolling several other news sites. The original postings look interesting too. Editor and Publisher has more . And for really Goodnews, check out this "Google News" page . Click on any story and get the explanation of why this exists. But just browsing this fake Google News page will make you smile. It's the news of the world as it should be. Think there's no racism in this presidential race? Jeff Fecke at Shakesville is collecting attacks and subtle digs on Obama . Bobby at Bark Bark Woof Woof comments . Also on this ...

Via Mindy McAdams' Teaching Online Journalism site, a link to a report by Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0: What Newspapers Still Don’t Understand About The Web . Karp just wanted to get some news about a bad storm that had knocked out power to his office in Northern Virginia, and could find nothing on it on the Washington Post's website, where he went first. Not that there wasn't news out there, and Karp explains step-by-step what he did to find it. No wonder Google is more popular than online newspapers. Mark Potts at Recovering Journalist had a similar experience . It turns out, of course, that Washington Post online readers have an alternative way to get to local weather news, but it's not obvious to someone just clicking on the main page.

Yesterday, Dave Winer raised an interesting point about the story of John McCain's first marriage in the Daily Mail. Why isn't this getting any attention in U.S. media? Why is this different from the story on Jeremiah Wright? One commenter says the story was pretty much covered in McCain's race against Bush. But....we have such short memories... ( Added later: ) On another note, apparently the conservative blogosphere is abuzz with news that some commenters on Barack Obama's website have expressed non-PC opinions. Hmm. Some bloggers have been quick to take a look at McCain's, and find some disturbing things there, too, expressed by visitors and never taken down. In Salon's War Room, Alex Koppelmann reports: Breaking news: There are crazy people on the Internet . Oh yeah. Says Koppelman: A warning to all future Democratic presidential candidates: If you choose to run part of your Web site in a model similar to, say, DailyKos, and allow the general public post...

It's becoming a given that if someone writes a news story that contains an error, bloggers will draw attention to it. Here's one in the New York Times that has Tennessee a'twitter: 36 Hours in Knoxville in the Sunday Travel section. It starts out: KNOXVILLE is often called “the couch” by the people who live there. Problem is, no one in Knoxville ever heard that before. And the Tennessee bloggers are letting the Times know. The story is all over the 'net since Nashville's Knoxville's Instapundit, probably the most read blog, posted it. (Thanks for the reader comment. Brain fade.) Lots of links on Michael Silence's blog at the Knoxville News, including a letter Silence sent to the Times' Public Editor . Lots on Jack Lail's blog too. The story was number one on the Times list of most-blogged stories. Now I've added another.

Lots of buzz about "Off the Bus" blogger Mayhill Fowler (see previous post ), after a profile in the Los Angeles Times and a Howard Kurtz column in the Washington Post . Oh, and a New York Times profile too. This woman has taken amateur journalism to a whole new level. Good for her. Over at BuzzMachine, Jeff Jarvis discusses Mayhill 's stories, too, and some comments he got about her and whether she should have identified herself as a journalist. But he is more concerned that in some of the comments, people who were obviously journalists didn't identify themselves as such, and sees a worrisome trend here. Certainly something I've noticed, especially in blogs discussing media, like Bob Norman's Daily Pulp blog covering South Florida media. So many comments coming from people who obviously work for the media, but completely anonymous. I know it's a question of worrying about their comments getting back to their editors, but hey, no one can get a letter to...

Back on the politics commentary, a couple things I found interesting in the last couple days: In The American Prospect, Seven Ways Hillary Clinton Changed Our Politics . In The New Statesman, Editor Andrew Stephen writes about Hating Hillary : Gloating, unshackled sexism of the ugliest kind has been shamelessly peddled by the US media, which - sooner rather than later, I fear - will have to account for their sins. And, from Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland (so on my reading list), in the blog of the Campaign for America's Future, The Meaning of Box 722 . In 1966 an open housing campaign in Chicago drew angry residents upset about the possibility of desegregated neighborhoods, and they expressed their anger in letters written to then Sen. Paul Douglas. Perlstein believes it was this angry backlash that destroyed Johnson's Great Society and brought Nixon's political career back from the dead. The hatred -- of which some certainly remains -- is frightening but the story en...

I'm increasingly intrigued by the parallels between 1968 and today as commentators write about Barack Obama and Bobby Kennedy in the same breath. Something is going on here: Tom Hayden, an icon of 1968, writes in Huffington Post (as do most of the following): Bobby and Barack . There are vast differences between Bobby Kennedy and Barack Obama, owing to circumstance, though both have followed hero's journeys of the classic sort. Kennedy was shaped by his brother's murder and the climate of his times, which drove all but the most robotic towards alienation. Barack is a product of globalization, immigration, even slavery, but nonetheless a privileged inheritor of the movements for which Bobby Kennedy stood. ...My hopes for Robert Kennedy might have been dashed by his subsequent policies if he had lived to be president, but I don't think so. The best evidence is the progressive course consistently pursued by those closest to him, Ethel and Ted Kennedy, to this day. It is ha...

Via Mark Schaver , a link to a posting at GraphicDesignr that lists the number of Twitter tweets coming from newspapers around the country. Among them, news, sports, even a Miami Herald Twitter on Cuba . A lot more than I would have guessed. Guess there is something to this Twitter thing after all. Of course, when I tried to get the Asheville Citizen-Times Twitter feed, I got the 'Too many Tweets' announcement.......

(An occasional reminiscence on the events of 1968 ) On Tuesday, June 4, California held its primary. Winning this primary was essential to Bobby Kennedy's successful nomination, to reverse the damage of his recent loss in Oregon, and he'd held rallies the day before in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Long Beach, Watts and San Diego, a grueling day. On primary day he, Ethel and six of their kids rested in a borrowed Malibu house and arrived in the evening at his LA headquarters at the Ambassador Hotel. At 10 pm. California time, he was confident of victory and gave interviews to NBC's Sander Vanocur and CBS' Roger Mudd. Just before midnight he gave a victory speech in the ballroom to his California supporters. The speech ended with "...and on to Chicago". On the way to another reception he took a detour through the hotel's kitchen pantry. It was there that Sirhan Sirhan was waiting with his gun, and there that Bobby Kennedy's campaign ended. Five other peop...

In all the blogging and commenting this morning about last night's speeches, one stands out for me. In The Moderate Voice , by Pete Abel: Three images from last night’s TV coverage will stay with me for years. 1. McCain’s reptitious, ill-timed, and creepier-than-usual grin … like the Cheshire cat on sedatives. 2. Clinton’s defiant smirk, as her NYC supporters shouted “Denver, Denver, Denver.” 3. Obama mouthing to Michelle after his speech, “How’d I do?” — and her apparent response, “Good. Real Good.” Says Abel: ...if Americans truly do vote more on gut than on reason, then these images suggest (already) who will win in November … in a landslide. On the news research front, Al Tompkins had links to a couple new tools in his 'dozen things I'm diggin'' sidebar, things that can answer one of the most frustrating questions asked of news researchers: how big is it, and how many swimming pools/football fields/Empire State Buildings will it fill? From Nikon, Universcale ...

I didn't know, until I noticed it in Dan Gillmor's blog, that respected McClatchy Washington reporters Warren Stroebel, Jonathan Landay and Nancy Youssef, have a blog, called Nukes and Spooks . Among other things, it monitors a good list of security and counterterrorism blogs. This is one I'll be checking in on. Gillmor brought attention to this posting, Memo to Scott McClellan: Here's what happened , in which Stroebel and Landay recap the work McClatchy (then Knight-Ridder) bureau reporters did in exposing the administration propaganda leading up to the war in Iraq. It contains a pretty damning list of administration lies and errors, which were documented long before McClellan's book. But what I really like about this blog posting is that in a list of bureau reporters responsible for the coverage, they include bureau researcher Tish Wells. We confess that here at McClatchy, which purchased Knight Ridder two years ago, we do have a dog in this fight. Our team - Joe ...

Part of the reason I've been remembering and researching the events of 1968 is because I just have a feeling about this year's race that brings up the uncomfortable events of that year. Fred Grimm, who I linked earlier today, makes the 1968 connection in his column today, Dems' future gets dimmer and dimmer : ...political rage makes up most of what I remember about the 1968 Democratic primary. I eventually voted, without enthusiasm, for Hubert Humphrey in the general election, but many of my friends, who had been so enthused about Eugene McCarthy or Robert Kennedy, couldn't bring themselves to vote for ``The Hump.'' Richard Cohen, who I first met in that year, may be having these feelings, it seems, and says this race disgusts him: A Campaign to Hate . I see little to be happy about, little that pleases my jaundiced eye. Yes, voter participation is way up and in the end, the Democrats will choose a woman or an African American and, to invoke that tiresome phras...

I'm intrigued with today's story about the Bill Clinton rant against the author of the negative Vanity Fair story about him, recorded by "amateur reporter" Mayhill Fowler ( at Huffington Post ), because Fowler is the same reporter who reported Barack Obama's comments at a San Francisco fundraiser about 'clinging to guns and religion'. (Dave Winer discusses .) After the first story, I pictured a young blogger, but it turns out Fowler is a 60-something former Tenneseean with a lifelong family interest in politics , who's worked her way into a position as a frequent 'Off The Bus' blogger. This is exactly what the 'Off the Bus' project was hoping for , I'd think, using bloggers to find news the major media misses. It's just one of several intriguing new ways of getting news that have been showing up this election year. They don't always last (I remember Voter.org from the 2000 election) but make things interesting while the d...

Miami Herald columnist Fred Grimm, in his new blog The Grimm Truth , makes a statement about journalism and blogging that strikes true to me, Blogging, Circa 1968 : Writing for a small town newspaper, knocking out one little story after another, every day, writing about everything that moved, I was utterly intertwined in the life of the community. And the community wasn't shy about telling me I didn't know what the hell I was talking about. I was blogging. I just didn't know it yet. This one will be on my daily visit list.

One of the things I miss most about reading newspapers online is getting to see all the pictures, in a size where you can make out detail. Many papers' online photos leave much to be desired, in size and number. So I'm thrilled to see this new feature from the Boston Globe, The Big Picture , a daily blog where the best news photos of the day are posted in large format. If one photo isn't enough, there are often links to more on the topic, such as these amazing pictures from the aftermath of the Chinese quake. I like this a lot.

In the upcoming issue of New York Review of Books: The Library in the New Age , by Robert Darnton. This discussion of how information is disseminated spends a bit of time on news, blogs, and other new media. Good stuff: ...stories about blogging point to the same conclusion: blogs create news, and news can take the form of a textual reality that trumps the reality under our noses. Today many reporters spend more time tracking blogs than they do checking out traditional sources such as the spokespersons of public authorities. News in the information age has broken loose from its conventional moorings, creating possibilities of misinformation on a global scale. We live in a time of unprecedented accessibility to information that is increasingly unreliable. Or do we? I would argue that news has always been an artifact and that it never corresponded exactly to what actually happened. ...having learned to write news, I now distrust newspapers as a source of information, and I am often surpr...

( An occasional reminiscence on the events of 1968 ) At the beginning of June, it was starting to feel as though the world was falling apart. France was still in an uproar, with strikes, protests, riots, and de Gaulle had just disbanded Parliament and announced a new election. Students were shutting down universities in Spain, England and Germany. Reaction to student protests in Poland had worsened anti-Semitism there and Jews were being asked to leave. There was civil war in Nigeria, where the Ibo nation of Biafra had declared its independence the previous year. A new Nigeria offensive this month led to a blockade and mass starvation. In Washington, things were a mess at Resurrection City, with rains creating a mudfield; the papers were reporting that young bored residents, some of them urban gang members, were bringing in booze and partying all night. Park Police weren't allowed inside the perimeter and fears of crime and violence were increasing. On June 3, Andy Warhol was shot ...

New York Times coverage of national political conventions, 1896-1996 . Agflation: The real costs of rising food prices , news and data from Reuters. KillerStartups.com reviews new Web sites. The Civil Rights Digital Library , at the University of Georgia. World Health Statistics 2008 from WHO.