All Blog Posts from Public Eye

“Decider” is so 2006.

Nowadays it’s all about the “Influencers.”

And contrary to the ‘decider’ where you couldn’t really pass yourself off as The One, the bonus about ‘Influencers’ is that you may be one and not even know it.

According to Editor and Publisher, there’s a new Newspaper National Network study out today:

Newspaper Web site users, who also read the print editions, are 52% more likely to shape opinions about new products, technologies, and issues than those who use the Web without consulting newspapers, according to a new study from the Newspaper National Network (NNN).

This inspired me to ask a very basic question: What the heck is an influencer?

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So the World Association of Newspapers – with the sickly and pallid acronym of WAN – has seen the future. And it’s … all over the place.

Academics, media experts, industry insiders and people called “Futurists” were all asked to look into their crystal balls and predict the media future.

They’re together now at the “Envisioning the Newspaper 2020” conference in Amsterdam – no doubt enjoying a Royale With Cheese or two – and presenting their predictions. But you, dear reader with a laptop or at your desk, can find out what they think here.

I took a look at some of the prognostications, and culled them down to a few. You can find some more here.

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Now you know how newspapers feel, Michael Moore.

Moore, the mad scientist of media management, has leveraged his new film “Sicko” into numerous stories of late, among them the controversy surrounding his trip to Cuba. But most recently, he's gotten some press that even he may find unwelcome: News reports on the fact that his film was pirated and uploaded onto the Internet for everyone to see.

This got me to thinking: Know who else fells your pain, Mike? America’s newspapers. Every year, the newsmedia likes to report on the fact that newspaper circulations are slipping further and further. People like to say it's a symptom of Americans' disinterest or dumbing down. It might even be Proof Of The Death Of Mainstream Media.

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I’ve always known I have an old soul. Watching old Chaplin flicks, hanging on to those vinyl records, calling cars ‘tin lizzies.’ (Okay, maybe not that last one.) But this week’s PR Week piece suggesting that editorials were going the way of the dinosaur had me grumbling like Grampa Simpson.

The piece opens like this:

Simply put, talk is cheap these days. The advent of cable news lowered the bar of entry into the public discussion; the Internet has almost totally obliterated it.

It then adds some grudging “well, maybe editorials still matter” testimonials before ending with this dirge-like kicker:

As the masses realize they can participate in the public discourse without a third party, newspaper editorials may slowly become - like copyboys and typewriters - a quaint tradition.

No doubt. Talk is cheap nowadays. And the public can participate in the public discourse. But far from being a techno-utopia, today’s spicy media jambalaya of blogs, cable news debates and talk radio shows doesn’t always lend itself to reasoned, step-by-step political and cultural discussion. And that’s part of their appeal.

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Thai Game: Yesterday, the Thai government blocked YouTube over a clip mocking King Bhumibol Adulyadej, the reigning monarch. "When they decide to withdraw the clip, we will withdraw the ban," Communications Minister Sitthichai Pookaiyaudom told Reuters. You can be jailed for 15 years for criticizing royalty in Thailand, where the king is widely revered. The most offensive part of the clip, Reuters notes, is "the juxtaposition of a pair of woman's feet, the lowest part of the body, above his head, the highest part of the body." Disappointingly, the video has now apparently been removed.

Land Of The Free: A free daily newspaper in Boston is about to begin webcasting its editorial meetings live on the Web, "subjecting their important decisions to the whims of any lunatic with AOL Instant Messenger and the time to tell them their ideas suck," as Paul McMorrow puts it. BostonNOW will also publish bloggers who are "willing and literate enough to work with them." RELATED: Justin Canning is making an environmental argument against free newspapers, the production of which means the destruction of 400 trees per day in London alone. He writes: "Is it possible to carry on letting the newspaper publishers of the world churn out a product that serves no real purpose other than to provide opportunity for advertising? Basic economics is one thing. Stupidity and irresponsibility is quite another."

Eh, Canada: The Toronto Star notes that, with the Washington Post closing its Toronto bureau, American newspapers will no longer have any correspondents in Canada. News from our northern neighbor will now be covered by "wire services, contract writers, freelancers and reporters parachuted in for specific events." The news, which comes amid a number of foreign bureau closings around the world, has observers fretting about a widening of the gulf between the two nations. Says Roy Peter Clark of the Poynter Institute: "Any American editor who finds Canadians boring has his or her head up their ice."

We thought we'd start Friday off with a bit of optimism – a slogan for a new, $75 million marketing campaign by the newspaper industry "to declare its relevance in the Internet age":

"The Internet is the best thing to happen to newspapers since the paper boy."

Kevin Drum notes an interesting, if not entirely new, point about the role of blogs from Jonah Goldberg:

I've toiled in the cyber-fields for close to a decade now (I was the founding editor of National Review Online), and what fascinates me is how the Internet is allowing the nation to return to its historical relationship with the media, not how it's changing everything.

In the 19th century, newspapers played a different role from the one we think they're "supposed" to play....American newspapers were never as unapologetically and uniformly partisan as European ones were (and still are), but they were still mostly creatures of specific political biases. There were Republican and Democratic newspapers, populist and communist newspapers, union and anti-union newspapers. These publications served as vehicles for partisan education and crusading personalities, in much the same way leading blogs do today.

Take another look at the most flagrantly partisan websites today: the liberal Daily Kos and its conservative doppelganger, Red State. What you see are media outlets trying to serve the same function as newspapers in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Writes Drum: "Yes, blogs are often shrill, boisterous, and unapologetically partisan. But that's a good thing. People who prefer reading to listening or watching haven't really had a rabble-rousing mass medium at their disposal for a long time, and blogs are a chance to recreate a part of Americana that we've sorely missed for the past half century."

One of the challenges in attracting an audience while doing a blog like Public Eye is that we strive to not be "shrill, boisterous, and unapologetically partisan" – traits that tend to drive traffic by appealing to ideologically like-minded subcultures. That's the way it works when you're affiliated with a mainstream media outlet. It's interesting to me that the blog universe and the mainstream media universe are essentially inverted when it comes to this issue – in blogs, the partisans are the mainstream, while the nonpartisan toil more or less on the margins. In the mainstream media, on the other hand, the partisan outlets – like the Nation and National Review – are the more marginalized ones.

Now, there are plenty of people, many of them bloggers, who would argue that the mainstream media is partisan. But it's interesting that the Internet seems to have helped shift the public towards perspectives that were long considered outside the mainstream when they appeared on the printed page.

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If you work at a daily newspaper, it’s probably more likely than not that you’ve been accused of bias in the past year. At least that’s what Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University found among the 527 randomly selected newspaper journalists at 218 daily papers in the U.S. that it surveyed, reports Editor & Publisher. (The full report will be available here sometime later today.)

Considering the ever-growing presence of organizations predicated on identifying such bias, this is not a terribly surprising piece of information. More interesting was that according to the report, those who had been accused of bias "often blame poor editing as contributing to inaccuracy in their articles." E&P also notes that “sources, anonymous or not, also were viewed as ‘problematic and potentially leading to factual errors…’” Wrote E&P:

Thirty-nine percent of respondents said they suspected a source was deliberately misleading them; 31 percent said that they had been misled by a source; 35 percent learned that one of their published stories had contained false information provided by a source; and 33 percent had concerns about a source that caused them to review a story with their newspapers' legal counsel.

In addition to the negative affect on the industry of numerous incidents of plagiarism, the report also found that, "newspaper journalists say problems in television news, on Web sites and blogs, and even in tabloids and shopper publications all have a deleterious effect on the credibility of newspaper journalists. In addition, almost one in five say that criticism of media by politicians erodes readers' trust."

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We like to think that, in America, the press is free to put out true stories without fear of reprisal. And for the most part it is – though not always, as Boston Phoenix editor Peter Kadzis acknowledged in explaining that one of the reasons his paper did not run the Prophet Muhammad cartoons was "[o]ut of concern for the safety of the people who work in this building." Still, after reading this San Antonio Express-News story by Mariano Castillo, it's hard not to think we don't fully appreciate how good we have it.

In violent Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, two state police officers were killed in what Castillo calls "the deadliest shootout in recent memory." There were five killings there in total on Thursday, all likely related to drug trafficking. But most local newspapers barely gave the story any play, opting to print brief, anonymous stories of less than 200 words.

There's a simple reason why, according to one local editor: "If we publish it, we die." He continued: "The bottom line is that we have to protect the safety of all our reporters and their families."

The papers have gotten a number of threatening phone calls over the last two years, and editors have decided that putting out the story isn't worth dying for. "The reality is that we're in a situation where there is no freedom to publish," said one.

The decision to at least run the story was a small stand against the threats, but Castillo says that for most editors "publishing the story felt less like an act of defiance and more like a retreat from the journalistic standards they want to give their readers" because it got such limited exposure.

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Just when you thought there couldn't be more bad news about the newspaper industry, E&P reports that the transit strike is harming local New York papers' circulation. The New York Post's circulation director told E&P: "We are definitely being hurt. There are not a lot of people getting into the city. The subways and bus lines are our bread and butter."



But while the strike has hurt hard-copy sales in the city, Web traffic to New York papers' sites have seen a boom:

At the Daily News, Kevin Hayes, executive editor of the Web site, said traffic is so heavy he has been unable to get in to check exact figures. "It is being bombed, which is a good thing," he said. "It is really loaded." When asked how the traffic compared to previous busy days, he said "It's not quite Sept. 11, but it is like when the Yankees win the World Series."

What else is booming because of the strike? Citizen journalism, apparently. The New York Times' Web site created a map of the city that posts dispatches from readers about their experiences commuting and dealing with the strike. The deputy Web editor tells E&P that more than 500 stories have come in so far.

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