Newspaper's front-page error leaves Palin fans literally out in the cold!| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
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The Times released numbers on 4Q and all of 2009. The 4Q decline was bad but not as bad as earlier. Online ads up 11%. Release:Total revenues were down 11.5 percent in the quarter, a significant improvement from the third quarter decline of 16.9 percent.
“We were pleased to see advertisers increase their rate of spending across our newspapers, Web sites and other platforms as advertising trends improved during the fourth quarter,” said Janet Robinson, president and CEO. “Our results also reflect our ability to restructure our cost base, introduce new products and innovations, leverage our brand strength and extend our reach to new audiences.
Full story of another horrific incident here. Reuters story opens:BAGHDAD - The U.S. military freed a Reuters photographer in Iraq on Wednesday, almost a year and a half after snatching him from his home in the middle of the night and holding him without charge.
The U.S. military never has said exactly why its forces detained Ibrahim Jassam Mohammed -- who worked for Reuters as a freelance TV cameraman and photographer -- and locked him away for so long, saying the evidence against him was classified.
"How can I describe my feelings? This is like being born again," Jassam told Reuters by telephone as he was greeted emotionally by his family.
Schwartz says the newspaper could have issued a public statement to end the unsubstantiated rumors that Paterson partied with women and drugs as governor.
Times spokeswoman Diane McNulty says the newspaper isn't responsible for what other news outlets and blogs reported. Hoyt did not immediately respond to Schwartz's request for an inquiry.
At briefing today WH Press Secretary Robert Gibbs mocked Sarah Palin by writing shopping list on hand: "eggs, milk, bread, hope and change." His boss also met with reporters today in brief press conference, first in months.
You have also been called the “No. 1 enemy of journalists in the world” because your government has arrested dozens of them since the presidential elections in June 2009. More than 60 are still in your prisons.
I was unfortunate enough to know firsthand how your agents treat journalists. I was kept in your jail for 118 days simply for being a reporter. For much of that time I was tortured.
But I do not hold any grudges. I am writing out of concern for my colleagues and the future of our country.
“Our future society will be a free society and all the elements of oppression, cruelty, and force will be destroyed.” It is not I who am saying this. It was your predecessor, Ayatollah Khomeini, who said those words to a reporter from Der Spiegel on Nov. 7, 1978.
Today's the big parade in NOLA guaranteeing more editions and sales of local papers. Here's Gov. Bobby Jindal with yesterday's Times-Picayune.
AP looks at newspaper sites editing or deleting blog items without telling readers. 
Turns out researchers at Univ of Penn have actually studied this, using the list of most email at the NYT site as a starting point. Did most of them have to do with sex, or marriage or pets or food as many might think? Well, they found people to be a little more "exaclted" than that. Excerpt:People preferred e-mailing articles with positive rather than negative themes, and they liked to send long articles on intellectually challenging topics.Perhaps most of all, readers wanted to share articles that inspired awe, an emotion that the researchers investigated after noticing how many science articles made the list. In general, they found, 20 percent of articles that appeared on the Times home page made the list, but the rate rose to 30 percent for science articles, including ones with headlines like “The Promise and Power of RNA.” (I swear, the science staff did nothing to instigate this study, but we definitely don’t mind publicizing the results.)
“Science kept doing better than we expected,” said Dr. Berger, a social psychologist and a professor of marketing at Penn’s Wharton School. “We anticipated that people would share articles with practical information about health or gadgets, and they did, but they also sent articles about paleontology and cosmology. You’d see articles shooting up the list that were about the optics of deer vision.”
Fascinating case. The well-known sports writer and commentator Stephen A. Smith halted his columns for Philly Inquirer a couple of years ago after paper demanded that he drop his political opining from his web site and other venues. He returned today after agreeing to that --but an arbitrator is studying whether this fits ethics of guild contract. Excerpt from Richard Prince:Smith's agreement to the Inquirer's ethics policy — which he contends has not been applied to other news employees — applies "until the dispute is resolved by an arbitrator," Bill Ross, executive director of the Newspaper Guild-Communications Workers Association of America Local 38010, told Journal-isms.While the capitulation, however temporary, silences Smith's views on politics, it also removes the Inquirer's rationale for not running his column.
"I'm glad the employer has done the right thing and published SAS column," Ross said via e-mail. Smith "continues to scan the sports landscape, and will continue to produce top notch columns for the Philadelphia Inquirer, that no doubt will attract readers back, who have stopped reading due to SAS long absence."
Dana Milbank of the Wash Post wrote a column about John McCain, then followed up with an online chat today in which he took the rare step of revealing his recent presidential preferences. Excerpt:My policy in each presidential race is to vote for the best candidate who is not on the ballot. I think this is superior to the Len Downie approach of not voting at all; I don't have to commit to one candidate or the other in the race, but I can still go through the exercise of who would be a good president. So I voted for McCain in 2000, when Bush and Gore were on the ballot. I voted for Chuck Hagel in 2004, when Bush and Kerry were on the ballot. And I voted for Mike Bloomberg in 2008.Followup:
I should also add that I live in DC so it doesn't make the slightest difference how I vote.
Two days ago we reported on the controversy over NYT's chief of Jerusalem bureau Ethan Bronner having a son in Israel's military and the paper's public editor calling for his reassignment. Here's a view from Israel press.
Just go to their site for everything Saints. Such as this Bourbon Street live cam! And my own musical tribute. -- Greg Mitchell
Clark Hoyt, the Times' public editor, in his Sunday column calls on the paper to re-assign its Jerusalem bureau chief, Ethan Bronner, after word emerged that his son is serving in the Israeli military.Keller:Alex Jones, director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy and a former Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The Times, took a different view. “The appearance of a conflict of interest is often as important or more important than a real conflict of interest,” he said. “I would reassign him.” Jones said such a step would be an injustice to Bronner, “but the newspaper has to come first.”
There are so many considerations swirling around this case: Bronner is a superb reporter. Nobody at The Times wants to give in to what they see as relentlessly unfair criticism of the paper’s Middle East coverage by people hostile to objective reporting. It doesn’t seem fair to hold a father accountable for the decision of an adult son.
But, stepping back, this is what I see: The Times sent a reporter overseas to provide disinterested coverage of one of the world’s most intense and potentially explosive conflicts, and now his son has taken up arms for one side. Even the most sympathetic reader could reasonably wonder how that would affect the father, especially if shooting broke out.
I have enormous respect for Bronner and his work, and he has done nothing wrong. But this is not about punishment; it is simply a difficult reality. I would find a plum assignment for him somewhere else, at least for the duration of his son’s service in the I.D.F.
You and everyone you interviewed for your column concurs that Ethan Bronner is fully capable of continuing to cover his beat fairly. Your concern is that readers will not be capable of seeing it that way. That is probably true for some readers. The question is whether those readers should be allowed to deny the rest of our audience the highest quality of reporting.
Readers, like reporters, bring their own lives to the newspaper. Sometimes, when these readers are unshakeably convinced of something, they bring blinding prejudice and a tendency to see what they want to see....My point is not that Ethan’s family connections to Israel are irrelevant. They are significant, and both he and his editors should be alert for the possibility that they would compromise his work.
Asst. police chief in Connecticut resigns after threatening reporter. Story too bizarre to summarize, read it here.Her article said that President Obama’s budget amounted to a backdoor tax increase for middle-income and even lower-income people, based largely on the scheduled expiration of income tax cuts passed in 2001. But the president had actually proposed keeping those cuts in place for all but high-income families..
After a complaint from the White House, Reuters withdrew the article, stating that it was inaccurate. But by then, some prominent conservatives had seized on the article, and a few - notably Rush Limbaugh - insisted that the retraction meant simply that the media were protecting the president
