(A friend suggested that I should go back to writing things here after I suggested shutting down the blog. Luckily the following came to my doorstep on Sunday.)
I suppose this is all due to a New Yorker who’s first name was Truman. But you decide if this journalism or great literature:
Outside Jaipur, young men virtually [...]
This article is a horrible example of journalism. It’s loaded with conclusions and no facts to back it up.
It starts off with:
Churches have long been considered safe havens from the evil of the outside world. No more.
But no where in the article, does it ever state whether there has been a marked increase in criminal [...]
Two things converged for me this week about newspaper leadership. First, I ran across a very old article about concerns of newspaper executives circa 1996. Next I read Byron Calame’s Public Editor column in the Sunday New York Times about what the Times’ editors know about their readers. The article about newspaper executive concerns [...]
Looks like DesMoinesRegister.com has gone through another iteration of redesign. I primarily get my news via RSS these days, so I don’t know when they changed the site. I commented on DesMoinesRegister.com in the past so I’ll offer my thoughts again.
For once, I’m impressed by some of what they’ve done. First, the speed with which [...]
Of course, the Wall Street Journal is considered the newspaper of record for U.S. business. But about once a week they go about picking on the wallets that pay their salaries. I’d guess that most of the WSJ staff is filled with Ivy League graduates who feel they’re a just a bit smarter than [...]
Well, it looks like the usual corporate ladder rearranging is happening today as the Des Moines Register hires Carolyn Washburn to be Editor.
As I mentioned before, the Register is a management training ground for newspaper editors within Gannett. You may think the Idaho Statesman is a Knight Ridder paper, but up until August of this [...]
As you know, the Des Moines Register’s teenage son, Juice, has been blogging for about four months now. And while the Juice blogs are continually crappy or just plain boring, we all knew at some point the full Register would have to join in the party. This past week the Register has turned on five [...]
Des Moines Register Editor Paul Anger is leaving to be Editor at the Detroit Free Press. Here’s a
link to the story.
This is great. Anger has really done nothing for the paper in terms of news coverage and quality. Sure he can brag about Kauffman’s Pulitzer nomination, but that’s an anomaly. Overall, the paper has sucked [...]
I mentioned last week about Vilsack creating the Heartland PAC and it’s prototype website. Now a reporter at the Mason City Globe Gazette is writing about the Heartland PAC’s fund raising activities so far (thanks to State 29 for the original link). But the reporter isn’t helping readers to make decisions for themselves, they are [...]
Back in March, the 3 largest newspaper chains agreed to buy a majority share in Topix.net. Think of Topix.net as a cross between Google News and Google Local – they offer news from a variety of sources that is aggregated by geography. (Yes, they also do this same sort of thing by topic – e.g. [...]
State 29 mentions a common financial reporting mistake made by many newspapers. (And one that I’ve written about before).
The last link to the Chicago Tribune story is basically a regurgitation of Whirlpool’s own press release. One indicator of this faux pas is the fact that both stories report to come from “Benton Harbor, Mich.”, where [...]
This is kind of humorous. Juice (the crappy-Des-Moines-version of Chicago’s Red Eye newspaper) is looking for guest bloggers.
Before you go sign up, here’s my advice:
Ask them what their daily readership is at DMJuice.com
Ask to retain rights to all your material
Go setup a Blogger account and do it yourself
From a post on Boing Boing, I came across and interesting phenomena relating to the bomb blasts in London today: real-time photo journalism. The combination of public photo sites with tagging photos has created a real-time set of images from London relating to the bomb blasts. Flickr has a number of tags which show photos [...]
So we’ve started getting the Sunday New York Times to compliment our existing subscription to the Sunday Des Moines Register. But for the last two weeks my wife has walked out to the driveway (where the Times lands) to get the paper and left the Register sitting outside on the front step.
Every Sunday, the easy-read-but-uninteresting [...]
While I was writing about my increased spending on news content, the publisher of the Wall Street Journal thinks prices of U.S. newspapers should be higher:In fact, Mr. Kann said he thinks publishers in general have underpriced their products.”No one in this room thinks twice about spending $2 buying a bad cup of coffee walking through an airport,” he said, adding that “we’re probably all too cautious about raising subscription prices.”I agree, but with one caveat. If newspapers raise the price of subscriptions (or eliminate free online news), they need to listen to readers more.
They are:• Christian Science Monitor• The Sunday Des Moines Register• The Wall Street Journal• Salon• The New York Times – SundayOn a daily basis, I also read washingtonpost.com and DesMoinesRegister.com…. The content coming from the above list is deeper, more well researched, and better written that most of the free content out there.
The Register is reporting on the sale of Maytag with headline and copy stating the deal is worth $2.1 billion (In fact the headline says “sold to … for $2.1 billion”). Yet, the WSJ puts the deal at $1.1 billion (sorry, subscription required).
I’d go with the WSJ on this one. It’s hard to think professional [...]
What are they thinking? The folks running DesMoinesRegister.com put a top level navigation in for the continuously lame juice publication. See below with the link highlighted by the red oval.
First off, it doesn’t fit with the top level categories they have in the navigation bar. “Hmm, I’m looking for some sports scores [under the sports [...]
This interview with Daniel Okrent, outgoing public editor of the New York Times (otherwise known as “ombudsman”), struck me as interesting. Especially the last quote in the article where Okrent talks about reactions to his departure:
Well, Phil Taubman, the Washington bureau chief, invited me back this March and said it was time for the exit [...]
There was lots of coverage of the NYT announcement yesterday of a report containing suggestions to improve credibility. But this story from Wired News is much more interesting, since it contains a detailed analysis of problems with sources.
These types of anaylses need to happen more often. And the news media shouldn’t wait until a problem [...]