News About ABC News Doesn't Come from ABC News

Website Relies on AP To Tell Its Big News of the Day

Since it was pretty much of a question of "when," rather than "if," word today that

David Muir would replace Diane Sawyer in the anchor chair at "World News" on ABC was significant if not earth-shaking.
Muir has shown himself to be more than up to the task. Whether that translates into being able to catch Brian Williams in the ratings is another matter. But swapping out a 68-year-old anchor for a 40-year-old model could portend a different look and feel for the newscast, though ABC is likely to deny it.

Even if the announcement didn't cause the tectonic plates under ABC News headquarters on the Upper West Side to shift, it was still a little weird to see how the news about the change could be found, if you go to an ABC News page, via Google News. Nothing from the network itself. Instead, it's the AP story about the move. In other words, ABC relied on a wire to report the story.
Before you write this off as a big-time network F.U.B.A.R., if you go to the ABC News.com homepage, there is a staff-written piece with an accompanying video package. Whew!
But still.
The AP story didn't get there by itself and shouldn't have been there in the first place.

Don't Piss on the New York Times Unless You Drink a Lot of Water

Walmart Flack Spends Too Much Time on Snark, Not Enough on  the Facts

A letter to the editor just wouldn't suffice.

Walmart's corporate communications veep David Tovar was really cheesed off about Timothy Egan's column in Sunday's New York Times. He actually had a headstart in generating his outrage, as the column appeared online three days earlier.

The basic premise of the piece by Egan (left) is that Walmart is a big contributor to poverty in this country because of the relatively paltry wages it pays to most of its 1.4 million workers.

Their humiliating wages force thousands of employees to look to food stamps, Medicaid and other forms of welfare. A sign appearing at a Walmart in Ohio last year, asking people to donate food so that the company’s employees “could enjoy Thanksgiving,” was a perfect symbol of what’s wrong with the nation’s most despised retailer.

Not that this is a new criticism, far from it, but it was made in the Times, in the Sunday edition, no less. The boys in Bentonville prepared to do battle.

That came in the form last Friday of an ersatz letter to Egan, in which Tovar (right) on his blog had some "fun," in his words, and annotated Egan's column and

offered in red ink--not unlike the variety commonly employed by high school English teachers--purported corrections to inaccuracies and distortions. It wasn't meant to be ha-ha funny in its observations. It wasn't meant to call out Egan as a dithering lefty in the tank for the progressives. But it was dripping with enough sarcasm to make you wonder what the hell Tovar was thinking.

Egan is apparently wondering the same, as he told Business Insider:

It seems pretty snarky for a company that puts Smiley buttons on every piece of Chinese-made crap they sell. I didn't see anything concrete, except the dispute over exactly how much they pay [employees] — which is in dispute. I cited two independent studies on their average worker's pay ... One was $8.81 an hour. The other [was under $11 an hour]. Wal-Mart says [it pays] $12-plus an hour, but critics say that is skewed, and they don't include part time workers, a huge part of their workforce."

If you take a look at Tovar's "notes," you'll see a lot of it doesn't exactly refute what Egan says, but tries to put a smiley face on some otherwise damning figures. And some non-sequiturs too. Egan wrote:

Walmart in 2010 pledged to spend $50 million over three years to offset some of the cost for a small percentage of employees who enrolled in a for-profit, online university. So far, it’s been a bust — only about 400 have earned degrees.

To which Tovar chirped: "Most college degrees take more than 4 years. Not 3?"

And that matters how? If you've reportedly committed $50 million to something, yet can show a precious few have benefited, how is that not a bust? Better to have said how many are enrolled and how many are on track to get a degree. But that might not help Tovar make his point, whatever that might be.

For many of his other notes, Tovar is either in furious spin mode (Did you know? Walmart hired over 92,000 veterans last year) or providing examples of something good that can likely be countered with many more worse stories. Conservative bloggers and websites were doing jigs over Tovar's takedown. But just because you write something in red pen doesn't necessarily make it right. It just makes it red, not a good color for a company whose logo is blue.

P.S. On Tovar's blog, he included a letter supposedly written by a store manager in Virginia that sings all the hosannas you'd expect about how wonderful Walmart's been to him. Fair enough. Now let's see if Tovar runs one from one of his cashiers who needs food stamps to feed her family.

Cranky Baseball Writers Get More Reasons To Moan, Thanks to the AP

You Really Didn't Want to Know Much Beyond the Score, Anyway, Right?

The Associated Press has raised the white flag to digital media when it comes to baseball coverage. This memo, released yesterday, details how game coverage will be revamped for shorter attention spans and tinier news holes.
AP writers will still bang out a 300-word story for quick consumption soon after the last pitch is thrown. Then comes the 600-word writethru, which has quotes and a non-hard news lede. Back when there were AM and PM cycles on the wires, a writethru might make it into a paper depending on the deadline. More often, they saw the light of day in afternoon newspapers.
Now that those are relics of days gone by, there's less of a need, at least for the longer version, or so the AP believes.
That's why its 600-word writethru is a traditional game story for the first 300 words or so, then goes to what the wire calls "chunky text," with five bullet points of notes and nuggets.
The purported benefits, as stated in the memo:

EASY TO READ: The format allows consumers to more easily see interesting content, and it can be read faster across platforms.
SPEED: The format is naturally shorter than a traditional game story and can be published more quickly, resulting in a faster turnaround time from AP to newsrooms.
FLEXIBILITY: Customers have the option of using the 300-word traditional game story, or breaking off the bullet point items for briefs on websites, mobile or in print.

And there, in the last sentence, is the heart of the matter--websites, mobile OR in print. Print is last. An afterthought. Or is it?
Take a look at how much space your local paper devotes to out-of-town games. A couple of grafs, maybe? Sure, the longer stories are needed for smaller papers in the region that don't staff a game, particularly on the road. But news holes have shrunk with circulation. You can get the job done in 300 words and not leave them hungering for more. Plus, you get the bullets, which feel like a value add, especially for papers without a beat reporter.
Still, in the end, remember this change is really all about following readers to where they are. And that's not at a kitchen table holding a paper. If they're not at a news site, they're likely on Twitter or a blog. They may not have the time or inclination for a longer piece, sad as that might be.
All this comes on the heels of a story last week from the Nieman Journalism Lab  about a study of newspaper sports reporters and their love/hate (with a slight emphasis on the latter) relationship with social media. They regard Twitter as a necessary evil, though at the same time it reduces anxiety because they don't have to worry about waking up in the morning and seeing they've been scooped by the competition. Everything's already moved online by the time the presses roll.
But at least one of the reporters interviewed acknowledged that if it wasn't for the online platforms, he'd be out of a job. Because he writes a blog--many of which are often filled with items like the AP bullets--that also drives traffic to the newspaper's website.
That's the whole ballgame--eventually, or so newspapers hope, digital ad rates will catch up to readership. It has to for newspapers to survive. If most of your readers are online, but your revenue isn't, eventually there won't be a print product. And no one to read 600-word baseball stories either.

Dukes of Hazzard Resurrected by AutoTrader

Good Ol', Or Is It Now Just Plain Old Boys, Are Back

I must confess whatever charms of The Dukes of Hazzard that kept it on CBS from 1979-85 were lost on this city slicker. My viewing was confined to snippets while surfing to another show. I'll assume a swell time was had by all.
Nonetheless, I'll extend a few kudos to the marketers and ad honchos linked up with  at AutoTrader,  who convinced John Schneider and Tom Wopat to reprise, by and large, their role for some spots. The two-minute version is below.

According to Adweek, AutoTrader went all in getting two-time Oscar cinematographer Janusz Kaminski (Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan) to direct. Wopat and Schneider, 62 and 64, respectively, seem no worse for the wear and were reportedly very game for the spot, which took six days to shoot.
As a bonus, the ad has Shooter Jennings singing the DOH theme song, originally done by his late dad Waylon.
And given the director's pedigree and the two-minute (at least this version) spot, look for it to appear at a multiplex near you. Which may be more of a sure thing than getting the best deal at AutoTrader.