A (Glenn) Close Call: Damages Gets a Two-Season Pickup

But There's a Catch: New Episodes Will Only Air on DirecTV

It looked like we'd be leaving Patty Hewes for good on the pier outside her house in the Hamptons at the end of the third season of "Damages."
The show was critically lauded, gushed over by the brass at FX, but it just wasn't getting enough love with the Nielsen families. Too bad, they didn't know what they were missing.
As delectably played by Glenn Close, the ruthless--to put it charitably--lawyer Patty Hewes had enough issues to have kept Freud and Jung working overtime. She knew how to bring adversaries to their knees, but her personal life was a royal mess, one that she often made. It made for great TV. And Emmy nominations.
The season just concluded was arguably the best of the three. A big reason for that was the startling but fully satisfying casting of Martin Short as a scumbag lawyer for a family whose scion made Bernie Madoff look like a striver. Short got an Emmy nomination for his troubles, along with Close and Rose Byrne, right, whose Ellen Parsons was alternately Patty's, mentee, confidant, nemesis and would-be murder victim.
"Damages" has always been good like that. Darrell Hammond, of all people, played a hitman in season 2, while Lily Tomlin had a prominent role this year. Throw in the likes of Ted Danson, Zjelko Ivanek, Keith Carradine, and Michael Nouri, among others wending their way through keep-you-guessing-till-the-end plotlines, and you have a most-satisfying hour of TV.

And despite the ratings, "Damages" lives on. DirecTV says it will bring back "Damages" for two 10-episode seasons starting next year, and relieve FX of the burden of canceling the show. The catch: unlike "Friday Night Lights," another ratings-challenged reclamation project, "Damages" will only air on DirecTV's 101 channel.

That alone might not be the best reason to dump cable for DirecTV, like I happily did six years ago. But it's pretty damn (Glenn) close.

When Is Long-Form Journalism Too Long?

Washington Post's "Top Secret America" Might Be Too Much of a Good Thing

My first thought after seeing the opening salvo in the Washington Post's on the unwieldy national security and intelligence apparatus was wow. Simply wow.

First off, look at the front-page layout above from today's paper. The story is basically the front page. But that's just the intro. The real saga--the first of three parts--starts inside and goes on for four open pages. Four.
Granted, there are graphics, sidebars, links, refers and other stuff of 21st-century newspaperdom. And I've committed to reading it. Honest. If the Post can spend two years putting together this mastodon-sized piece of Pulitzer bait, then it behooves me to see what they can do.

But therein lies the rub. I'm a newspaper dweeb. Always have been, always will be. But the question is, how many like me are out there. If you're crammed onto the Metro on a Monday morning, are you going to start chewing on a massive enterprise piece, no matter how worthy?

To be sure, if you are not one of those people, the story's website does a more-than-adequate job of bringing the story to life. You can then digest it at your own pace. And you should.

My first question is, why try to cram this behemoth into three days? It seems you could just as effectively tell the story in five or six days as you would three. The yeoman work put in by reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin would have resonated just as loudly. But faced with four open papers to sift through, I fear a lot of readers will simply skim or give up, rather than dive in.

That might have been different if the Post had started the series on Sunday, when people have more time. Which leads me to my second question: why didn't it start then, especially when the Post has a much-larger circulation, 798,000 compared to 578,000 during the week?

One answer came from managing editor Raju Narisetti, who told The New York Times that news sites see dramatically more users during the week than on the weekends. "In my view, it's the first project done at The Post where the power of the project lies online," he said.

Ah, so. It makes eminently perfect sense. Yet, print is still wagging online's dog when it comes to revenue. The Post didn't take up the better part of five pages just to provide fodder for an online venture. Or, maybe it did. If all those extra page views turn into bigger ad bucks, then we'll know the real back story.

And it won't be a secret.

Dave Kindred's "Morning Miracle" About the Washington Post Without the Sugar Coating...

But Maybe A Dollop of Empty Nostalgia Instead

I'm looking forward to getting my mitts on Dave Kindred's book "Morning Miracle," his paean to the Washington Post subtitled "A Great Newspaper Fights for Its Life."

Indeed, it's not the paper it once was. Then again, no paper is.

The book, which hits stores July 20, was favorably reviewed in the Post yesterday by American Journalism Review editor Rem Rieder.

Rieder affirmed this was a book worth reading for lapsed news scribes like myself, or anyone who gives a damn about what happened to journalism and what can still be done to right the ship.

The only troubling note was a sentence Rieder quoted, where Kindred waxes: "I love the smell of newsprint in the morning, and my favorite time of day is thirty minutes to deadline."

First off, when's the last time Kindred smelled newsprint? The Post and most other papers are printed on offset presses that produce smudge-free papers. Long gone are the days when you had to wash your hands or wear gloves after reading the Post or Times.

As a cub at the UPI Albany bureau, I would go down to the mailroom as the Times-Union was coming off the presses and got a few copies to take up to the bureau. I don't remember much of a smell. What I savored was the crisp, folded paper in my, yes, smudged hands. A morning miracle indeed, or at least an 11:15 p.m. miracle when the T-U's bulldog edition came out. But a smell? Meh.

Still, Kindred remains a print guy through and through. In that sense we are, um, kindred spirits, and I'm sure to soak up his dispatches from the front of what is hopefully a winnable war, at least in D.C.

Getting the Facts Straight About the Mets

Fox Gaffes Show When Producers Need to Step Up to the Plate More Aggressively

While watching the Mets on Saturday against the Washington Strasburgs, the usually reliable Joe Buck got tripped up a couple of times. At least, I know he got tripped up. If he knew, or if anyone in the Fox truck knew, they kept it a secret.

No one expects announcers to get everything right all the time, but it's not too much to ask that when they do screw up, that they at least make some version of a correction.

First, Buck mentioned Mets reserve catcher Josh Thole, who started Saturday's game. After Thole got a hit, Buck said Thole was now "3 for 7 in his Major League career." All well and good, except that wasn't true.

Those were Thole's stats for 2010. But he had 53 at-bats in 2009.

Buck actually made reference to Thole's "career" stats twice. So, why did nobody in the Fox production truck, which surely has access to anything and everything put out by the Elias Sports Bureau, not know that what Buck said wasn't true, or if they did, whisper something in his earpiece so he could correct himself?

You might think I'm getting overly lathered about a remark over a third-string catcher. But when you're broadcasting a game that's being seen in New York, you're talking to a lot of knowledgable fans who know Thole is relatively new, just not brand-new. There's nothing wrong with getting it right, hubris be damned.

Buck dug his hole a little deeper later in the game when he talked about the once-precarious state of Mets Manager Jerry Manuel's job, and how he had gone to see the "Broadway musical Fences" and was told by Denzel Washington to hang in there.

August Wilson's "Fences" is indeed a Broadway classic, But it is decidedly lacking in hummable tunes, which is why it won the Tony last month for Best Play Revival.

Might be time for Joe Buck and his producers to take in a show next time they're in town.

Washington Newspaper Woes a Metaphor on an Anomaly?

Maybe the News Cycle Pedals Too Fast Around the Beltway. Or, Maybe the Buisness Model for Newspapers is Sicker Than We Thought

The recent struggles of The Washington Times have transcended being taken seriously as more than just the scrappy conservative alternative to The Washington Post. Its very survival has been called into question when 60 percent of the editorial staff got the heave-ho last year when the Unification Church grew weary of subsidizing what has never been a going concern.
Not that the Post has had the luxury of gloating. It had its own round of layoffs last year, closed its remaining domestic bureaus, and trimmed staffing from its admirable website. Oh, yeah. It also loses a lot of money.
In this year's first quarter, the newspaper division booked an operating loss of $13.8 million. Yes, that's better than the $53.8 million lost a year earlier. But it's still a big-enough chunk of change that institutional investors won't countenance for long.
And the hits just keep on coming, as the company reported in its earnings release. Daily circulation was off 12.5 percent, with the Sunday numbers dipping 10.4 percent compared to 2009.
In an online chat today, Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli admitted that the boffo revenues from the Washington Post Co.'s Kaplan educational division may be keeping the newspaper afloat.
"That's an interesting and hypothetical question," he said, in response to a query about whether the Post would still be in business if not for Kaplan. Brauchli said one look at the financials showed how much the entire company depended on Kaplan, not just his product.
So, what gives D.C.?
Is everyone so crazed down there that they don't have time or inclination to read a paper? Does everybody wake up with a Blackberry pinned to their forehead, so they can start emailing right away and read Mike Allen's Playbook while in their pajamas? Maybe it's the Post's crappy app, not worth the price of admission at $1.99. Or, maybe too many of the right people already know what they need to know before it hits the paper and move on to Roll Call or The Hill.
Sure, the Post is still a potent journalistic force, even if it's been defanged somewhat by newsroom cutbacks. And, no, I don't think as so goes Kaplan, so goes the paper. There are still 562,000 daily copies printed, with another 780,000 every Sunday. That still adds up to a loyal readership.
But if the Kaplan spigot started to trickle rather than gush, you'd see a newspaper that would have no choice but to further compromise its already-less-ambitious vision. And that would be a shame.
Given that Washington is, well, Washington, it's hard to tell whether the Post is caught up in its own circumstances or part of the industry-wide malaise. I suspect it's a combo of both. Either way, it doesn't bode well for those of us who have come to count on the Post as both a watchdog and dutiful chronicler of all that matters in and around the Beltway. Let's hope that interesting and hypothetical question doesn't get a real answer anytime soon.

Simon Rich--Boy Wonder

Looks Like He'll Be Getting Carded in Bars Until He's 40

About all I know about Simon Rich is that he's a preternaturally talented writer -- the youngest ever hired by Saturday Night Live, nailed a two-book contract from Random House before he graduated Harvard and, oh yeah, his parents are Frank Rich and Alex Witchel.

And judging by all the huzzahs that have come his way, he earned his own cred and didn't gorge on the fruit from the nepotism tree. Bully for him.

What I haven't been able to figure out yet, though, from my semi-cursory research, is that even though he was born in 1984, every photo of him that's on the web makes him look like he's about 12. The one (left) that accompanied the review of his first novel, Elliot Allagash in today's New York Times looks like an outtake from his confirmation/bar-mitzvah or whatever. Ones I spotted elsewhere also revealed no signs of facial hair. Pretty freaky. But talented. Enough so, to get him reviews in the daily Times and the Book Review on May 20.

Both mostly positive assessments, of course, were done by Times outsiders.

Just wondering, but if his old man wasn't a big cheese at the paper would he have gotten that treatment? As I said, just wondering. Simon does have his own set of chops, but the double review treatment for a first novel -- his previous book, "Ant Farm and Other Desperate Situations" was a collection of quickie satires and comic observations -- is accorded to few and far between. For now, every review, like this one in the Chicago Tribune, will tag him Son of Frank -- even when that's not the sum of his many parts.

As Helen Thomas Continues to Extract Foot From Mouth, a Little Context

Outrage Over Her Anti-Semitic Remarks Trumped By Her Irrelevance

Patrick Gavin has an excellent takeout on Politico that puts as harsh a spotlight on the Helen Thomas F.U.B.A.R. as you would want for a washed-up 89-year-old hack whose relevance as a force in the White House press room really faded about 20 years ago, around the time the majority of major media had finished abandoning UPI.

Sure, there's lots that can rightly be said about Thomas being a trailblazer, a pointed questioner, a dogged chronicler of presidents going back to JFK, blah, blah, blah.

You can also say she was more than a tad overrated. Back when I was a cub reporter in the 1980s at UPI, I'd be able to see how Thomas' copy came into the desk. Suffice to say, those in the slot had their work cut out for them. She filed in multiple tasks. It was up to the editors to craft a narrative.

Granted, if you were on deadline and were banging out copy at a place where the slogan was "a deadline every minute," you often didn't have the time to make it pretty. But putting together stories like this was Helen's M.O. To her credit, she was the first to admit that her copy would be rewritten. She was a reporter first, a wordsmith a very distant second.

No doubt, she worked hard during her prime. Thomas and her UPI colleagues had no choice, because getting beat by the A.P. was not an option. She may have been a role model. But she was hardly the complete package as a journalist.

And now we find the same could be said about her as a human being. How sad, yet at the same time a valuable cautionary tale for anyone who thinks they're indispensable and doesn't know when to sign off. Instead, Thomas got the hook. She deserved nothing less.

Somewhere, a cabal of press secretaries for Republican presidents are having a damn good laugh, no doubt hoping the door hit Thomas good and hard on the way out.

Honolulu Advertiser Put to Sleep As It Goes To Bed

A Final Aloha for Hawaii's Main News Source

The Honolulu Advertiser box that I came across today in Maui was empty by the time I got there. Maybe there was a rush for the final edition of the 154-year-old paper. Or, maybe the circulation department had already thrown in the towel.
Either way, the Advertiser will now be referred to in the past tense, as its name becomes part of the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, an amalgam with the surviving Star-Bulletin, which debuts tomorrow.
But Sunday remained a day of elegies, eulogies, salutes, and ruminations for the fallen paper, which was sold by Gannett to Star-Bulletin owner David Black for a reported $125 million. That's the discounted price for a monopoly in today's semi-moribund newspaper business.
To put the end in the perspective, it's only proper to hear from an Advertiser veteran -- and there were many -- like Pat Glaser, an editorial assistant for many years.
Said Glaser: "I'm going to miss our big, dysfunctional news family. I wish us all the very best."
As do I.

Honolulu Advertiser Continues Its Fade to (David) Black

As Hawaii's Oldest Paper Reaches its Pau Moment, Longtime Writers Put on a Brave Face

As the Honolulu Advertiser has its -30- on Sunday, the first reaction is that David, in this case David Black, owner of the rival Star-Bulletin who's buying the Advertiser, firmly kicked the butt of Goliath, played out in this version by Gannett.
But there's no happy ending here. Honolulu will be a one newspaper town next week. And 430 people who had a job will mostly now have a hard time figuring out where their next paycheck will come from. Severance agreements from mostly union contracts will help, but for many who spent their career in newspapers in Honolulu will have to find another line of work.
It would have been a lot easier to bid good riddance to Gannett if the Advertiser had been sold to someone else. After all, it was Gannett that had tried to buy the Star-Bulletin in 1999 to shut it down and end its joint operating agreement with Liberty Newspapers.
But a local outcry and the federal government kiboshed that. In came Black from Canada, who instead bought the S-B from Liberty to keep it alive. How times have changed.
As the newspaper industry has tanked, Black has claimed he's lost $100 million running the S-B. Gannett has said it's also in the red. It chose to bail, rather than fight. Even though it had suffered the cuts every other paper has been forced to endure, the Advertiser was still a better-than-average Gannett paper, which still managed a 115,000 daily circulation, compared to just 37,000 for the S-B.
It's a tight-knit news community on the islands, filled with scribes who are natives or have become one through decades of service at either paper. As an example, the writer of today's Advertiser story about the closure was written by Rick Daysog, who wrote the story linked above from the Oct. 20, 2000 edition---of the Star-Bulletin.
I've been reading the Advertiser the last couple of days as I take a break from some R&R in Hawaii, and the farewells in the paper are getting louder and more insistent. They include food editor Wanda Adams, who had a front seat as the island's cuisine evolved into a world-class fusion of flavors and reverence for locally grown and caught food. She's working on starting a website. Best to her with that.
Today, we heard from golf columnist Bill Kwon, who worked more than half a century at both papers covering sports all over the world. And while I'm sure he'd still rather be working, his column is headlined "For five decades I had the best job in the world," and you know he means it. He really did have a great ride.
Too bad a lot of other talented journalists won't get to say the same when the new Honolulu Star-Advertiser debuts Monday.

Down in the Gulf, the Clueless Just Keep Getting Cluelessier

BP Media Relations Advisers Masquerading as Douchebags by Bigfooting Independent Contractors into Silence

And the hits just keep on coming with BP.

A nice get from News21.com shows the lengths the company will go through to cow into silence the fishermen who's lives it has destroyed now that they are doing anything they can to contain the spill.
That included "news releases, marketing information, or any other public statements" if they wanted to keep working on the cleanup. Which they pretty much had to, since there is no other source of income.
BP has since backtracked on some of that language, but the damage is done. All of a sudden, yet another PR strategy is stuck in the muck washing ashore with another wave of bad ideas that has laid waste to a way of life.

Putting Al-Tipper in Perspective

Bubba-Hillary Still the Alpha Dogs, but When It Comes to Wedlock?

This comment from a Democratic operative to Politico pretty much sums up the news on Al and Tipper calling it quits:

Can you believe that Bill and Hillary are still married and Al and Tipper are getting divorced?

Not really. It was about as likely as a climate-change bill making it through Congress this year. But now.....

WSJ's Greater New York Section: Not Great. Yet.

Sure, the More the Merrier, but Make the Section Relevant First


Rupert Murdoch made no secret of why he wanted to create a section devoted to New York news within the Wall Street Journal. He wanted to squash The New York Times like a diseased bug, eat all the Sulzberger young and dance on their graves in some kind of bizarre pagan ritual holding aloft a copy of News Corp.'s latest earnings report.

OK, maybe not the pagan ritual, but you get the idea.

Simply put, Murdoch doesn't want the Journal to be a second read, like it is for me after I polish off as much as the Times as I can during my commute. He wants the Journal to be all the wealthy, powerful, and influential digest with their venti soy latte and brioche. Of course, if they want to use it to hide the fact they're actually reading The New York Post, no harm, no foul.
But the Greater New York section is not a category killer. It's more like an eager puppy, jumping up and down, not always peeing on the paper (the Times, of course), but eager to please.

First, the good:

---The mostly featurish approach to local sports coverage works most of the time. The Journal assumes you found out elsewhere what the score was, and if you really care what the Mets did, there are innumerable sources for recaps and analysis. But the real saving grace of the sports coverage is columnist Jason Gay, whose "The Couch" column in the regular Journal on Monday is destination reading. It's at once funny, knowledgable and reverential. But can we do away with the courtesy titles in sports stories? "Messrs. Burnett, Sabathia, and Teixeira, whom they signed in a....." Yeesh.
---The Journal made a good pickup in having Jason Gershman cover state government. He knows his way around the miasma that is Albany. At the same time, he has seamlessly shed the ideological bent that marked his reporting in the late, lamented neocon-fave The New York Sun.
---The aggressive real estate coverage definitely adds to the conversation about a topic that nobody can stop talking about.


Not as good:
--The lack of a voice. The section badly needs a feisty columnist to hoist a few petards and let us know when the glass really is half empty, like the Times has with Jim Dwyer and Clyde Haberman. Right now, the only columnist is Ralph Gardner Jr., who takes a more gentleapproach to view life in the city. A recent column focused on a guy who used to work in finance and now wears a lobster suit handing out fliers in midtown for a seafood joint. Nothing wrong with that sort of thing, but maybe not every day, and not at the expense of something hard-hitting.
--The Heard & Scene society coverage. Maybe it's just me, but I don't give two craps about who's attending what charity ball and the designer togs they're wearing. I have a feeling, among readers under 65, that I'm not alone. If you only have a 12-page section, squandering precious real estate on floss and dross just makes me finish the paper faster.
---If you're going to call the section Greater New York, then cover Greater New York. That means the world outside of the five boros, where so many of the Journal's readers live. I'm not saying you have to set up bureaus in Greenwich or Scarsdale, but there are enough interesting stories in the 'burbs going uncovered by the desultory and/or desiccated papers there that could have broad appeal for Journal readers.
---The lack of coverage about New York's blood sport: dining out. Inexplicably, the main Journal scaled back on food and wine, when it effectively dumped freelancer Raymond Sokolov's restaurant column in March and got rid of nonpareil wine columnists John Brecher and Dorothy Gaiter in December.

To be sure, it really is a compliment to say that the section is a good complement to the rest of the Journal. But it is not a replacement for the Times, which for diehard readers -- from arts coverage to Maureen Dowd, from the crossword puzzle to Floyd Norris -- is simply too hard a habit to break.
There may come a point where, if you don't already do so, you might start reading the Journal because of the Greater New York section. However, it's nowhere close to getting you to stop reading the Times for the same reason.

Thirsty? How About Some Soy Jizzum?

The Gang at Fox 5 Near and Dear in the Heart of YouTube Land

Fox 5 New York morning anchor Rosanna Scotto's been in the TV news game a long time now. But that doesn't mean light-hearted banter comes easy to her. Sometimes, it's better just to read the teleprompter. Or shut up. Then again, if she had done the latter, we wouldn't have this to show you:

And it's already prompted a remix:


Thanks people with no hobbies!

Idaho's Governor Not Having A Ball With This Story

C.L. Otter Not Gettin' Along with the Little Doggies

From the Eastern Media Elite Desk comes this snicker after reading an item from the A.P. in The New York Times about how Idaho Gov. C.L. "Butch" Otter was back on the job after two nights in a hospital with fever and dehydration.

Seems the 67-year-old Otter felt ill last weekend while, wait for this, helping Lt. Gov. Brad Little brand and castrate calves.

Turns out, it was the second time this year Otter has assisted Little with ball-shearing duties at his ranch. "He likes to help, it's a nice change of pace," Little told the AP.

After all, he can only threaten to cut the balls off of legislators. The calves: not as fortunate.

It's not necessarily the kind of story you'd say "Only in Idaho" about. Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer, for one, is a rancher and likely knows his way around an emasculator (that's what one implement is really and aptly called).

It's safe to say most of Otter's counterparts on the other side of the country are exposed to calves only if they order the veal marsala at their favorite Italian joint.

Meantime, glad ol' Butch is back in the saddle again.

Wall Street Journal Editors Should Make Their Own Paper a Must-Read

Photo Cutlines Really Are Part of the Paper Too

Taking up about a third of the real estate above the fold on the front page of Wednesday's Wall Street Journal is a photo of a street battle in Managua firing at a hotel where Nicaraguan lawmakers were meeting to try to repeal a decree President Ortega issued extending the terms of some officials.
All well and good. Nice picture and all. But what I just wrote above is all you'd have found in the Journal about this story. Normally, big display art would normally lead to a story inside the paper if it didn't accompany the photo. Not here. If the photo is deemed worthy enough to occupy A-1, there needs to be more to the story. There needs to be a story, first and foremost.
And if you do a story with matching art, make sure the photo's cutline refers to it. On page A10 in the same edition, the story headlined "Airports Reopen, Safety Debate Lingers" had a photo captioned: An Icelandair plane takes off Tuesday from Glasgow International Airport bound for Reykjavik in Iceland."
Only problem: The photo clearly shows the plane is one from Lufthansa and, as an online correction noted, it was taking off from Dusseldorf.
Glasgow. Dusseldorf. Hard to tell them apart after all that volcanic ash mucking up the works. But at $2 a copy, you expect Journal editors to be paying more attention to not-insignificant details like that.

When Less Really Is Saying Less

An "Undisclosed Illness" for Yankees Trainer Gene Monahan in The New York Times is Cancer Just About Everywhere Else

Among those receiving World Series rings yesterday was Yankees trainer Gene Monahan who has been with the team since 1973. Monahan was moved to tears by the ovation he received. Why? You really wouldn't know by reading The New York Times.
Stalwart columnist George Vecsey said Monahan is "not working this spring while battling an undisclosed illness."
Yankees beat writer Ben Shpigel is no less ambiguous:

"Gene Monahan, the beloved longtime trainer who missed spring training because of an undisclosed illness, surpassed that. During the ceremony, Monahan was called forward first, and the Yankees honored him by having him stand alone with his ring by first base."
“Knowing what he’s going through, it was really emotional,” said Girardi, who fought back tears after the game as he spoke about Monahan. “We’re all thrilled to see him here.”

But Monahan's illness is anything but "undisclosed."
In the Daily News, baseball writer Bill Madden devoted his entire column to Monahan, and told us he's battling cancer and receiving daily radiation treatments on his neck and throat, including one that morning in the clubhouse.
George King and Brian Lewis also devoted an article to Monahan in the New York Post, while Erik Boland in Newsday and Chad Jennings in the Journal-News also mentioned the cancer. And so on.
It's inconceivable that both Shpigel and Vecsey both don't know the true nature of Monahan's illness. They're too good reporters to slip up like that. Rather, they appear to have been muzzled by a P.C. copy desk that wants nothing short of a press release or full confessional confirming the disease before they will let the C-word make it to print.
But Monahan's diagnosis was hardly a secret. And upon seeing its rivals write about his battle in an unvarnished way -- complete with quotes from Monahan about his ordeal -- sports editor Tom Jolly or someone in his minion could have fixed the omission online or in late editions of the print version.
Saying his illness is undisclosed is not just incomplete. It's wrong. Monahan's not hiding from the truth. Neither should the Times.

The Truth Shall Not Set the Vatican Free in Abuse Scandal...

So It Attacks The New York Times for Telling the Truth; Denial is Also a River That Runs Through Rome

Ah, nothing like a tsunami of stories about pedophile priests to put a damper on Holy Week. And it seems like the Vatican has had enough -- with the media coverage, that is.
Cardinal William Levada, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, told the Associated Press: "I am not proud of America's newspaper of record, the New York Times, as a paragon of fairness."
This harrumphing is over the startling and sad story by Laurie Goodstein about how the church mishandled the case of a Wisconsin priest accused of molesting deaf boys, even though officials knew going back to the 1950s he may have been up to no good.
What has the Vatican incensed, though, is that Goodstein reported that Milwaukee's archbishop sought to have the priest defrocked and appealed to the office run by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, and was apparently discouraged from pursuing further action. At no point did the Times report that edict came from Ratzinger. But Levada still views that as guilt by association, and he's not a happy camper.
But, of course, as a Times spokeswoman pointed out to the A.P., the Church never disputes the accuracy of the article. It merely doesn't like what it says.
Just for chuckles, I looked to see what Bill Donahue, the president/mouthpiece of the Catholic League had to say about this, if only because Donahue always reflexively attack anything and everything that even remotely smacks of being anti-Catholic. He didn't disappoint.
Donahue also went into kill-the-messenger mode. "Why did the victims' families wait as long as 15 years to report the abuse? Why were the civil authorities unconvinced by what they uncovered? Why did Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert Weakland wait almost two decades before he contacted the Vatican?"
Again, Donahue never says that they're lying. But that doesn't stop him from questioning motives anyway.
That's typical Donahue and it appears the Vatican is reading from the same playbook. That's a mistake, yet another one it has made as this scandal begins to spiral out of control.

Remembering Ron Lundy

WABC Radio Great Dies of Heart Attack at 75

If you grew up listening to radio in New York in the 1960s and 1970s, then you knew Ron Lundy, because you listened to WABC, where Lundy ruled the midday shift.

"Hello, Luv!" he boomed to millions of us on WABC and later on WCBS-FM until his retirement to his native Mississippi in 1997.

Lundy had been in failing health lately, and a heart attack finally took him yesterday.
A classy tribute from Bob Shannon on WCBS-FM can be heard here.

The New York Radio Message Board is awash with heartfelt tributes and great stories, including this one from Vince Santarelli involving Lundy's close friend Dan Ingram, another radio legend who followed Lundy on WABC:

When Ron came to New York to sign his contract, he finished up and popped his head in the studio door and told Dan Ingram, "I'll see you in two weeks."
Dan responded, "the hell you will. You're going to stick around and when I get off the air tonight, we're going out for drinks and steaks and talk."
Ron himmed and hawed and finally called the airport to arrange a later flight. The two went out after Dan got off at 6 and had a good night.
Later on , they found out that the plane that Ron was originally supposed to be on, crashed into Lake Michigan with no survivors.

He was lucky that night. Just damn good the rest of the way. Go in peace, Ron.

Trade Schools Flunk Crucial PR Test with New York Times

Many Only Make Matters Worse in Scathing Front-Page Article

The article in Sunday's New York Times about the precarious mix of high debt and low pay for many students of for-profit colleges and trade schools was a real education.

Peter S. Goodman expertly pried the lid off of the often-unseemly recruiting practices of many schools, which left students awash in broken promises and mounting bills.

Let's hope that some of the schools mentioned use the piece as a cautionary tale, not for how to do right by their students -- although that would be a welcome byproduct -- but how not to turn into a quivering mass of gelatin when a reporter calls.

To wit, ITT Educational Services, one of the industry's top names, where a former financial aid officer told of risking the wrath of management if she told prospective students for computer and electronics trades about likely job prospects, which weren't good.

“If you said anything that went against what the recruiter said, they would threaten to fire you. The representatives would have already conned them into doing it, and you had to just keep your mouth shut.”

Offered an opportunity to reply, ITT's flackette demurred. And you know what that means for the average person reading the article: Guilty as charged.

A major opportunity to score brownie points was wasted, and proof of why a company of any size should have a crisis communications plan in place rather than diving for the bunker and acting clueless.

The same goes even when you do choose to cooperate with the media. Career Education Corp. spoke with Goodman, who focused on the experience of a former student at the company's Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Portland, Ore.

While the company wouldn't comment on that student, citing privacy concerns, it did send Goodman the names of other students to talk about their experiences. That's when the journalistic equivalent of a wet dream began.

One came with a wrong number. A second had graduated 15 years ago.
A third, Cherie Thompson, called the program “a really positive experience” but declined to discuss her debts or earnings. The fourth, Ericsel Tan, graduated in 2003 and later earned $42,000 a year overseeing catering at a convention center near Seattle. He said his success reflected his seven years of kitchen experience prior to culinary school.

Not exactly fodder for your testimonial page, huh? It's basically a reverse gotcha. Career Ed walked into an ambush of its own making, one that a few phone calls could have easily avoided.

Instead, kudos to Goodman, whose article may help steer students away from a life of big debts and small payoffs, while hopefully shaming these schools into doing more than just lining their pockets.

Wall Street Journal's Lifestyle Coverage Goes on a Diet

First, It Scales Back on Wine Coverage, Now It's Dumping Restaurant Reviews Too


The Wall Street Journal's going all schizoid on us, and it has nothing to do with its wacked-out editorial page.
At the same time, the Murdochian paper of record for the financial set is ramping up with a mysteriously intriguing New York edition, it's nipping and tucking other resources, and not for the better.
Pete Wells reports in The New York Times food blog that restaurant critic Raymond Sokolov called it quits after he was asked to cover food trends instead because the paper was abandoning restaurant reviews.
Sokolov, who had ridden a most-filling gravy train filing entertaining and informed reviews from all over the country, demurred.
Maybe the bean counters got all cheesed off when Sokolov filed a column from Vegas, where among his stops was a new Japanese restaurant called Shaboo, where the tab runs $500 a head. Tax, tip, and wine extra. And he wasn't dining alone.
But those kind of expense reports didn't seem to bother the Journal much, though that seems to have changed more ever since ol' Rupe got his mitts on the paper.
In December, the Journal dumped the husband-and-wife team of John Brecher and Dorothy Gaiter, who wrote an estimable wine column.
The Journal, just like it promises with restaurants, didn't abandon wine coverage entirely. But it's more intermittent and largely devoid of insight let alone personality.
Sokolov's departure means yet another reason the Journal's Saturday lifestyle coverage is less appetizing.
What was once a must-read over the weekend is now a I'll-maybe-get-to-it-if-I-have-time-after-reading-the-Times-and-FT read.
At a time when he's adding a New York edition, Murdoch should be running headlong at his competition, not running from it.

More Fallout from "Last Train to Hiroshima"

Charles Pellegrino's Editors More Out of Touch with Reality Than He Is

Much has been written in the last week or so about the book "The Last Train from Hiroshima," and how Henry Holt & Company after author Charles Pellegrino confirmed he was duped by his primary source who claimed to have been a last-minute replacement on one of the planes that escorted the Enola Gay, which dropped the a-bomb on Hiroshima.
So, the book, which was originally going to be corrected in future editions, is now kaput. Holt said it acted not only because of the lies told by that source, but also because Pellegrino may have fabricated other sources in his book, which he vehemently denies.
Beyond this pathetic case of he said, they said lies a larger issue, namely getting facts straight before the book goes to press.
It is what editors do, after all, besides checking that you used the serial comma and didn't split infinitves. But maybe not.
As Robert Gottlieb, the famed editor who worked at Knopf and helmed The New Yorker -- known for its annoyingly fastidious fact-checking department -- told The New York Times:
"It would not be humanly possible to fact-check books the way magazine articles can be fact-checked, just because of length."
So, by Gottlieb's standard, if a 500-page manuscript at least smells right, that's good enough. Facts? We'll just cross our fingers and hope for the best. What twaddle.
Even worse is Pellegrino's editor at Holt, a 15-watt bulb named John Macrae, who told the Times "the difference between fact and fiction is a very fine line."
Come again?
To be sure, the Times article by Motoko Rich does state that Macrae questioned more than 250 parts of the book, but he was more interested in survivor stories and less focused on how the bomb was dropped, the fabricated story of which led to the book's demise.
But let's go back to Macrae's whopper just above. "The difference between fact and fiction is a very fine line."
Here's a guy who has trouble distinguishing between the two and yet he's a high-ranking editor at a major publishing house. How sad. Maybe that's why the book industry has to undergo a ritual humiliation every couple of years.
Macrae sounds like he's channeling Nan Talese, who got burned in 2006 by James Frey in the "Million Little Pieces" debacle. Back then, she said: "At the New Yorker and Time and Newsweek you have experienced people who know where to go and what's right and what's wrong. We don't. There's been a traditional dependency on the author."
Talese was also the one who insisted that memoirs should be held to a different standard than an autobiography, but that's another sorry issue.
So what we're left with are publishers unwilling to spend a little extra money and time vetting a book like "The Last Train to Hiroshima" that sheds a different light on a pivotal moment in history. Instead supposed publishing pros offer lame mea culpas for a massive FUBAR like this one.
Holt paid a steeper price than what fact-checkers would have cost because of the hit its reputation took over this embarrassment. It's a stain that won't wash away anytime soon.
But what's even sorrier are excuses like the ones coming from Gottlieb, Macrae and Talese, and why it's only a matter of time before I'll be blogging about the next dubious manuscript to get pulled from circulation.
We're supposed to learn from our mistakes. Too bad the book industry is a little slow on the uptake.

What's Up, Doc: Emrick Has Another Gold Medal Run Calling Olympic Hockey

And You Don't Have To Believe In Miracles to Get Excited

As the USA's 5-3 stunner Sunday over Canada in Olympic men's hockey continues to sink in, thoughts inevitably wander to the Miracle on Ice in Lake Placid 30 years ago. Even if it was edited and on tape delay, and some of us found out the score too early (thanks, Rene Poussaint at WJLA!), it was still a great moment and one that will define the already-considerable career of Al Michaels.

So, it was pretty classy of him to tell Richard Sandomir in The New York Times how he was hardly wistful about not being behind the mic calling the games in Vancouver.

“Here’s the reality: Mike Emrick might be the best guy to ever call hockey,” he said, referring to NBC’s play-by-play announcer. “I can’t do it one-tenth as well.”

Which tells you all you pretty much need to know about Emrick, who the diminishing number of New York-area hockey fans have been able to enjoy in his regular job as the TV voice of the New Jersey Devils.

There have been other stops along the way, but the Devils gave Doc (he has a PhD in broadcasting from Bowling Green) a much broader canvas on which he paints eloquent word pictures that are at once intelligent, insightful, and in perfect tempo with the pace of the game. He's an exquisite student of hockey, but he's never a show-off. The knowledge is parceled out only when needed. It's always about what's on the ice, not him.

Sandomir noted that Emrick said following a particularly frantic period of play: “It’s kind of nice to have it peaceful right now. I hope I’m not yelling too much.”

Not to worry.

More recently, he's been calling Stanley Cup games and the Winter Classic on New Year's Day for NBC, so he's hardly a poorly kept secret. It's not like he only brings his A material for the network. He has no B material.

But viewers who only watch hockey once every four years will notice just how good hockey can be. And Emrick will be a big reason for that, no matter what the final score is.

New Music Channels on DirecTV: Sonic Crap

DirecTV Dumps Sirius XM To Save Dough and Latches on to Pale Imitator

While it's far from perfect, I have always found much to like on satellite radio, particularly what was put out by XM. Even after it merged with Sirius, there was still plenty to keep me listening for the adult album alternative and singer-songwriter tracks I gravitate to most often.
Given that only one of our cars -- the one I'm usually not driving -- has XM, I usually listened via DirecTV. Spectrum, The Loft, and The Coffeehouse were often on in the house. No more. A couple of weeks ago, DirecTV dumped SiriusXM for something called SonicTap, programmed by an outfit called DMX Music that, among other things, puts together music channels for cable systems.
DirecTV never said why it made the switch, so you can assume money was the overriding issue. It can't be because DMX is delivering a better product when just the opposite is the case. It's what happens when you have a computer program a channel instead of a person. Algorithms may work on Pandora, but DMX shows no signs it's invested in R&D to offer an intelligent music mix.
To wit: Spectrum is now called, stultifyingly enough, Adult Alternative. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't.
The Loft, which was laden with a very deep playlist and quirky, compelling specialty shows from the likes of David Johansen and Lou Reed, along with New York radio legends Vin Scelsa and Meg Griffin, is now called Singer-Songwriter. Unfortunately, these singer-songwriters are usually heard on adult contemporary stations. Again, no clue.
As for The Coffeehouse, the channel is now called Coffeehouse Rock. But the lunkheads at DirecTV and DMX apparently never heard the channel, which is devoted mostly to acoustic performances and alternative versions of well-known tracks. It was the perfect accompaniment to reading a book chapter before bed. Now it is the aural equivalent of a double espresso rather than the soothing decaf it once was.
So, now I have a good excuse to turn off the TV a little sooner. Time to get reacquainted with the stereo and the CD collection. I'd rather DIY my music choices than DMX them any day.

Killing the Tigers in Order to Save Them

Fascinating Wall Street Journal Piece Opens Rare Window to Chinese Tiger Farms

Today's Wall Street Journal has an item about a proposal by two economists to legalize sale of tiger parts in China to combat poaching and reduce the rate that the habitat for wild tigers is shrinking.
And these parts would come from farm-bred tigers. That's right, farm-bred, which is legal in China, where 6,000 tigers are bred in captivity. I was initially in a bit of denial when first wondering why there are tiger farms in the first place.
Were that that many zoos out there that needed to restock? Nah. The article by Beijing correspondent Shai Oster notes that some farms exist for research. After all, wild tigers in China have been virtually hunted to extinction. Then there are those that tourists can visit and feed the tigers live cows and chickens.
But it appears they really exist to harvest parts for use in traditional medicines, parts that can sell for up to $70,000 on the black market when taken from one animal. Yes, these sales have been banned since 1993, but Oster reports some farms have freezers filled with hundreds of carcasses in case the ban is lifted.
It's a fascinating story, one that makes a good case for why newspapers need their own foreign reporters and not rely on wire service reporters who are too caught up in the day-to-day work to do too much enterprise reporting.

Casting a Pall

Death of Luger Nodar Kumaritashvilli Leaves Media at a Loss for Other Words

The papers that came to my door this morning read as follows:

Luger's Death Casts Pall Over Start of the Winter Games--Wall Street Journal

Luge Athlete's Death Casts Pall Over Olympics--New York Times

The death of a Georgian competitor in the luge during training cast a pall over the opening of the Vancouver Winter Olympics.....(opening of refer on A1 of Financial Times)

Pall.

It actually has several definitions. But the apt one here for the horrific death of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvilli is "anything that covers, shrouds, or overspreads, esp. with darkness or gloom," according to Dictionary.com.

A pall can also be a cover for a coffin, bier, or tomb. That will come later.

Obviously, the athletes, officials, dignitaries and journalists at the Vancouver Games were shocked and saddened by the crash, which is now being attributed to human error. In other words, Kumaritashvilli didn't have enough experience to handle a challenging curve on a highly technical track while going nearly 90 mph.
But while the tragedy is unmistaken, after watching the opening ceremonies last night -- and no, you didn't need to stay up late to know Gretzky was going to light the flame -- you have to wonder if there was really a pall. It was a deservedly festive affair, understated, dignified and entirely appropriate. Very Canadian indeed.

I didn't sense a pall. It would have been easier as well as more accurate to describe the incident as one that "momentarily tempered" or "muted" the celebration, especially when the Georgian team entered the stadium and, later, when a moment of silence was held for the fallen luger.

And Kumaritashvilli's death doesn't appear to have cast a pall at the luge track either, where today -- aside from a "change in the ice profile -- it's business as usual.

For another interesting take on how papers handled the crash, Charles Apple looks at it from the perspective of a graphics editor, asking whether this really needed to go on A1. The answer he reluctantly comes to, I much less reluctantly come to, is yes.

How Willie Mays Hustled Leo Durocher

Sure, Durocher Was a Father Figure, but Say, What the Hey, It's Just Money

Before he's going, going, gone, Willie Mays finally decided to cooperate with a biographer. It only took him to age 78 to realize this was a good idea, before more baseball fans than not had heard of him. Borderline blasphemy, I know, but these kids nowadays, no sense of history.
Anywhoo, Bruce Weber's story in yesterday's New York Times had an interesting nugget that will make "Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend" (out next Tuesday) a keeper if there are a lot more stories like the one about his first Giants' manager, Leo Durocher, who Mays regarded as a father figure.
To help keep Mays out of trouble, Durocher would have him room with his 7-year-old son Chris and look after him on the road. Chris told Dad he was eating a lot of soul food and Durocher gave wanted his son to eat steak.

"And I said, 'well give me steak money then.' And Leo would whip out four or five hundred and stick it in my pocket. And we'd go somewhere, and I'd ask Chris, 'you want a steak?' and he'd say 'No, I'll eat what you eat.' I never told Leo."

As anecdotes go, that's a home run. Let's hope there are another 659 like them in the book.

Game Change Cover: Prescient or Pretentious

We Know The Heilemann-Halperin Blockbuster is Good, But This Good?

My copy of "Game Change" made a surprise arrival tonight after Borders.com told me it was on backorder and I'd have to cool my heels for at least a couple of weeks.
So, before I started to devour the many political morsels contained within, I noticed at the top of the cover it said "#1 New York Times Bestseller."
That's fairly recent news. And even more remarkable given that I opened the book and discovered that it was a first edition.
So, maybe HarperCollins knew something we didn't. Or maybe they were just cocky.
Either way, they were right.

Haiti Quake: Being There for the Big Story Has Its Price

Post-Katrina Pattern of Personal Reporting the Order of the Day. NPR's Jason Beaubien Offers a Textbook Example

No doubt, when a big story breaks most journalists want to be where the action is, even if they never leave the newsroom. Resources, experience, maybe even a little chutzpah, often determine who hits the road.
So, you have your cadre of reporters who show up in war zones and natural disasters. They want to be there, not because they're paid to, but because that's where the story is, where what their work can be a game-changer, misery and reward worked into one.
Yet, it is the Haiti quake that has been a game-changer for some, who have seen some of the worst that fellow man and Mother Nature can dish out. This one is different.
That was evident yesterday in a report on All Things Considered, when NPR's Jason Beaubien was doing a Q&A with anchor Melissa Block outside a hotel, talking about a badly wounded girl bandaged but otherwise lying untended. As he looked at her and described her condition, Beaubien began to cry.

"She keeps lifiting her head and her lips are shaking .... Sorry, Melissa," he said amid tears.
"That's OK," she quietly replied."
"It's heartbreaking, what is happening here," Beaubien continued, quickly regaining composure. "There are people just in the streets everywhere."

This is no journo-tourist. Before becoming Mexico City bureau chief, Beaubien spent four years in Africa for NPR, reporting from 27 countries, where war, famine, and AIDS were a prominent part of his landscape. He's also been to Haiti before, covering the aftermath of hurricanes.
It was interesting that Beaubien was interviewed by Block, who filed report after gripping report from China, following the earthquake that devastated Sichuan province in 2008. She was a human being first, a reporter second. And that's how you get the story right, not to mention a shower of awards that came her away, along with co-anchor Robert Siegel and their team.

Beaubien's the father of two boys. When he gets home, there are bound to be lots of hugs.

It's hard to say who will need them more.

Evening Newscasts Not Dead Yet

Still, Don't Expect Metamucil and Depends to Stop Advertising Anytime Soon

From TV Newser comes good news for those who toil in and around the likes of Katie Couric, Diane Sawyer, and Brian Williams.
Some 27 million people watched the network newscasts in the first week in January, with ABC/Sawyer putting up a good fight against NBC, though Brian Williams is still top dog by a good margin.
That's not to say those numbers will be as robust throughout the year, especially as the weather gets warmer. But still extremely decent by any measure.
A caveat: only 8 million or so of that number is linked to the 25-54 demo. So, the bulk of the audience is still older boomers and/or their elderly parents. And contrary to advertising myths, they still spend money, and not just on the prescription drugs that account for so many of the ads between 6:30-7.
The tough part will be finding new viewers as the old folks start aging out, something newspapers have failed miserably at. The nets have an advantage in that they don't charge for their product. The larger question remains how many will continue to need it. Short-term, that's not a worry for the news divisions. Twenty-seven million viewers have seen to that.

Now It's Being Called the Muff, Instead

Dam it, Canadian magazine The Beaver Changing Its Name

Canadian history magazine The Beaver was founded in 1920, back when a beaver was just, well, a beaver.

Ah, how times and dirty minds have changed.

Seems double entendres take their time making their way across the border, hence a belated name change of the magazine to, yawn, Canada's History.

Love this quote from editor Mark Reid:

"Market research showed us that younger Canadians and women were very very unlikely to ever buy a magazine called The Beaver no matter what it's about. For whatever reasons, they are turned off by the name."

It must have been a serious problem as Reid used "very" twice, which I take as the Canadian equivalent of Defcon 4 in the publishing business. The women part I can understand. Younger Canadians? Not so much. If anything they'd just be pissed off when they find out the magazine is about history and not, um, you know, wildlife.

A Delicate Marketing Dance: DNA Testing Goes Mainstream

So Where Do These Kits Go In the Drug Store, the Condom Aisle?

I stumbled upon an ad the other day for a swab-at-home DNA Paternity Test from a deftly named company called Identigene.

Apparently, it's the only over-the-counter test of its kind. As such, it's a little weird to see a product like this being touted in a magazine let alone on a store shelf. Then again, we don't think twice anymore about ads for condoms, douches or vaginal-itch cream.

Ads like these, for better or worse, have become a fact of life -- literally so, for Identigene.

In case you were wondering, the collection kit goes for $29.95. The test itself is another $119.

Sort of.

As the kit's website points out, there's a difference between this test and a legal test, in other words, one that would be admissible in court. The testing methodology is the same; the only is it involves an independent party who would verify identification and witness the collection. That'll run you another $250.

Interestingly, Identigene is playing to people who want both outcomes. On the home page is a link to the ABC show "Find My Family," a Kleenex-fest where long-lost family members are reunited, kids looking for birth parents, etc. Identigene provides the DNA testing for the show.

Next to that link is one for a New York Times magazine from November about men who find out through DNA testing that they weren't the father of their children after all, and how a negative paternity test isn't necessarily the end of the story.

Either way, Identigene is there to help -- for $149-$399, of course.

New York Post Gives Us The Sizzle and Steak on Plane Bomber

And the winner of front page of the day is.....

Of course, it's easy to have a laugh now, but.....

Decision by Wall Street Journal to Cancel Wine Column Leaves a Bad Taste

Departure of Dorothy Gaiter and husband John Brecher Leaves Big Hole in Journal's Lifestyle Coverage

The Wall Street Journal wine column from husband-and-wife team extraordinaire Dorothy Gaiter and John Brecher was destination reading for me every weekend in the Wall Street Journal.

As I became more interested in wine, I always looked to them to help become more educated about vintages and varietals, a massive undertaking that Dottie and John pulled off impeccably. Obviously, they knew a lot more about wine than you or me, but were never uppity about their expertise. Their knowledge was easily imparted, freely shared.

So, it was with more than a measure of sadness that they mentioned, almost in passing in Saturday's column, that it was their last one. No explanation, but as the Vinography blog adeptly notes, most likely an economic one.

Until now, I had appreciated the Journal's decision to keep the wine column humming, as I noted in a posting last year. After all, the paper had to pay two salaries as well as the tab for the dozens of bottles of wines sampled for each column. But the couple showed they were worth it.

Dottie and John were nothing if not thorough. Maybe too thorough for Murdoch's beancounters.

What made their column truly great was how their passion for wine was intertwined with their love for each other. Discovering wine and telling us about their great finds was a grand adventure for them that we were privileged to be a part of.

Their column and family life often intersected -- a trip to Disney World with their daughters also included sitting at the chef's table and drinking expensive wines at the resort's top restaurant -- meant readers felt like we knew them as well. That's why I'm referring to them by their first names, just like they did in the columns.

Whether it was a $6 bottle of Vinho Verde or a $1,500 Chateau Latour, they showed us how drinking wine can at once be a deeply personal, fun, and wholly subjective experience. Their "yuck" could have been your "delicious," or vice versa, and that was perfectly fine.

Dottie and John often got some of their biggest responses for the annual "Open That Bottle Night," which occurred at the end of February, and encouraged people to uncork some wine that had a special meaning or significance. This communal gathering celebrated wine for wine's sake, not to glorify oenophilic snobbery.

That's something you can't take for granted nowadays in wine journalism. All the more reason to hope that Dottie and John land elsewhere. I'll drink to that.

No Business Like Snow Business on New York TV

Nothing Like a Blizzard to Get the Competitive Juices Flowing, But....

From my perch in Westchester County, the first big snow in the New York area was so-so.
We got a mere eight inches, compared to the rest of the family blitzed by at least 21 inches on Long Island, where Newsday captured this picture. Other areas got more. In other words, the kind of story that keeps people glued to their TVs. Nothing like having reporters do live shots in a blinding storm to tell you it's snowing so you don't have to find out for yourself.
Not surprisingly, the stations trotted out a lot of their first-string anchors and weather guys. Chuck Scarborough is usually anywhere but a studio on a Saturday night, but there he was on WNBC-TV with Melissa Russo, while regular weekend co-anchor DeMarco Morgan was booted outside to do stand-ups from Times Square. Talk about being big-footed.
WNBC has slashed and burned its staff, and shed many a veteran reporter as it cut costs concurrently with its plunging ratings. But it was relatively game last night. While I didn't see it because I have DirectTV, the station had a continuous storm broadcast on one of its digital side channels anchored by David Ushery.
From what I can gather it was solid, public-service journalism, more akin to what you'd get from an all-news radio station. But what WNBC really should have done was put that broadcast on the main channel. It's not like there was a compelling need to run WWE wrestling when the area was being bodyslammed by the snow.
I didn't find out until almost after the fact but WNYW/Fox 5 trotted out Ernie Anastos and Rosanna Scotto for a 9 a.m. broadcast this Sunday. It may have been lightly attended given the station normally is running religious programming in that slot, so if you weren't watching the 10 p.m. news the night before, you were likely somewhere else. Like WABC/Channel 7, the usual clock cleaner in New York when it comes to news ratings and staff.
The station had the equivalent of a weekday complement of reporters in the field, with at least eight checking in for live spots, with two weather anchors, including weekday mainstay Lee Goldberg pulling duty Saturday and Sunday.
The coverage was solid, workmanlike fare if somewhat limited by the predictable nature of the story itself. But they made the most of what they had. The only one who came up short was weekend weather anchor Heidi Jones, who was dispatched to the LIRR station in Mineola to report on the myriad delays on that system.
Only problem: Jones really didn't know what she was talking about. First, she kept talking about suspensions of service at places like Far Rockaway, Long Beach and West Hempstead. True, but those are also the names of branches on the line, which meant about 20 stations had no service. She repeatedly showed she didn't know the difference and nobody bothered to correct her.
Ditto for when she kept talking in the present tense about a train that broke down overnight, and how passengers were still stuck on the train when Newsday.com reported the train had been towed to a station and passengers were placed on another train.
That's when producers come into the picture. If a reporter is stuck doing stand-ups, somebody actually has to be making calls to ensure the information is correct and current. It was a rare misstep for a news operation that otherwise sets the table for how TV news is covered -- or not -- in this market.
P.S. Memo to the staff at NBC New York.com, the website for channel 4: this picture was taken in Maryland, not New York. Thought you might want to know.

Fairies Sprinkling Dust at Wall Street Journal

Must Be Something in the Air on Sixth Avenue

More than one person was grasping for the same , ethereal analogy in the Wall Street Journal yesterday.
On Page B5 in a story about The Limited's success with its Bath & Body Works division, Limited big cheese Leslie Wexner is quoted as saying the results are not "just fairy dust."
Then on Page B6, a story about Peter Ligouri being hired by Discovery Communications to be its COO quotes him as saying "The biggest challenge is having the magical fairy dust."
Because, after all, you don't want the unmagical fairy dust.

A Cynical Yet Pragmatic Move by Tribune and Scripps-Howard

Companies Hope Non-Subscriber Turkeys Will Pay to Gobble Up Circulars and Coupons

From the why-didn't-someone-think-of-this-sooner file comes this item from Bloomberg, reporting that Scripps and Tribune will jack up the newsstand prices for their papers tomorrow to squeeze a few more coins out of casual readers grabbing the papers for the Black Friday sales ads.
And we're not talking just another quarter or so. In some cases, papers are charging the Sunday price or even more.
“It’s a once-in-a-year sort of event for us,” said Mark Contreras, senior vice president of newspapers for E.W. Scripps, publisher of the Memphis Commercial Appeal, told Bloomberg. “The Thanksgiving paper in every place we offer it is the biggest newspaper of the year.”
Scripps and Tribune aren't alone. The Washington Post and the Kansas City Star are also boosting prices.
Contreras said the largest Commercial-Appeal of the year comes out on Thansgiving, when circulation more than doubles to 195,000. "Frankly, I don't know why you wouldn't charge more," he added.
Neither do I. But let's keep it in context. That big paper Contreras is so pleased about will largely come from preprinted ad inserts. In other words, they cost the paper nothing to print, only to distribute. So, profits from higher newsstand prices can be considerable.
But don't think for a moment that more ads mean more articles. Similar to the Detroit Lions' chances of winning tomorrow, its not going to happen.
One MediaNews executive is quoted as saying the Thanksgiving papers offer "real value" because shoppers can ostensibly see all of the best sales in one place.
Let's be clear: the real value is to the publishers, who need to do anything and everything they can to prop up revenues. It also might be the only way they can say happy Thanksgiving with a straight face.

Marcus Brauchli Puts Happy Face on Closing of Washington Post Bureaus

Convinces No One But Himself That Coverage Will Be Undiminished

Not a big surprise, given the state of affairs in the newspaper business, but still regrettable, is word from The Washington Post that it will shutter its last three national bureaus. The remaining reporters in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York will get a chance to work back at the mother ship, but their assistants are out of a job.
You don't need one hand to count the number of papers with a sizable bureau presence outside of Washington. In fact, you can stop after The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and USA Today. Everyone else has pretty much closed up shop and relied on those papers and the A.P. to do the dirty work.
We get it. It's the new paradigm. Unfortunately, Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli doesn't get it, or if he does, isn't letting on. He's quoted in the NY Times saying the Post's "commitment to national news of interest to our readers is undiminished."
All well and good. Only problem: the Post will be doing most of its committing the same way most of the 1,400 remaining papers do: using the A.P. Sure, they can parachute in when something big's going down, and no doubt they will. Then again, the Post's newspaper division lost $166.3 million in the first three quarters this year. So, maybe not.
But there's nothing quite like being there, especially in New York. Now the Post will have to figure out whether to send a reporter to a story outside of D.C. by reading about it somewhere else. At least the Post still has a dozen or so foreign bureaus.
For now.

New York Times Turns In Wrong Direction to Take a Look at Effects of Recession

And the Main Subject of the A-1 Article by Michael Luo Agrees; When a Comments Section Actually Serves a Useful Purpose

The above-the-fold piece on the front of today's New York Times has a compelling headline: Job Woes Exacting a Heavy Toll on Family Life .
The copy editors did their job. But it appears everyone else involved with the story did not.
The piece by Michael Luo rests on the notion that the "greatest damage inflicted by this recession has not necessarily been financial, but emotional and psychological."
All well and good, except for the fact that Luo goes off the tracks when he focuses on a surburban Dallas man named Paul Bachmuth and his family. Luo adequately chronicles the trials and tribulations the family has experienced since he was laid off in December from a $120,000-a-year job as an energy consultant, including therapy and more than a few arguments and fights.
But the portrait is woefully incomplete, as evidenced by a photo cutline that says, in part: "Mr. Bachmuth ... at a job fair; he got a job offer last week."
Good for him. But why isn't that mentioned in the story? Is he going to take the job? Will the stress and pain that his layoff engendered now go away? Might there actually be a happy ending albeit one woefully inconvenient for the premise of the story?
We don't know, and maybe never will. The article enigmatically ends with a vignette about one of the daughters:

At night, she said, she has taken to stowing her worries away in an imaginary box.
“I take all the stress and bad things that happen over the day, and I lock them in a box,” she said.
Then, she tries to sleep.

If the Times could update the story in a cutline, it's inexplicable that it wouldn't update the story itself -- one that could have changed the story and most likely improved it. Someone else not impressed by how Luo handled the subject is none other than Paul Bachmuth, who in the online comments for the article gave some hint about how he was put through the sausage factory of newsgathering.

Michael Luo sent in an e-mail to a job networking group that I belong to. That is how he found me for this story. I had read a number of Mr. Luo’s articles on the recession and its impacts, and was very happy that someone out there was reporting on this important issue. I agreed to be the subject of this story in the hope that it might help others. However, I conveyed to Mr. Luo many times that I did NOT want the story to portray me and my family as “victims”. We are not. The last thing in the world I want is for people to “feel sorry for me.”

Given that Luo reveals how despite the fact Bachmuth's wife took a part-time job, but did little to help out around the house while idled that's unlikely. But I see his point.
It's a danger when the media tries to report on trends, or perceives a trend and tries to create one. There are no hard numbers on how widespread this problem is, and it might not be one, certainly in relation to the stresses that layoffs otherwise bring on.
No doubt, finding people to go on record to talk about something so difficult is not easy, and I have no doubt Luo labored to find the right subjects. But the Bachmuths weren't them. And the way the article ends it's almost as if Luo got up and left when a bell rang in the newsroom. Shift over. Narrative be damned.
In other words, we didn't get the whole story. When you charge at least $2 for a copy of the paper, it's not too much to ask for, especially when many people out of work can't afford that in the first place.

Time to Bargain for More of David Segal's "The Haggler" Column in New York Times

The "Action Line" Column Moves into the 21st Century

Among my destination reads on Sundays -- at least when it's in the paper -- is "The Haggler" column by David Segal in the business section of The New York Times.
Ostensibly, the column is a distant cousin of those "Action Line" and "On Your Side" columns of yore, where readers would write in seeking help when a utility company screwed them over, or the TV repairman ripped them off.
Segal performs that service, in a way, but uses the space to showcase his witty, gifted writing in the process. Sure, he takes his mission seriously, but too much so. And he merrily skewers the screw-ups who have wronged those who've written for help.
It's a fun read. Too bad, it only appears every two weeks. That's because Segal's real job is to write longform features for the Sunday business section, which are off the beaten path from the usual fare.
Times editors have given him the license to write with a little more abandon, almost as if he's writing for a magazine. Indeed, these are the kinds of pieces that would fit in nicely in a place like Fortune or the late, lamented Portfolio.
At times he'll use the first person or the "this reporter" to show he's a little further invested in the story and its outcome. It might not be how they normally do it at the Gray Lady, but it keeps you reading, no small feat when confronted with 2,500-3,000 words on a Sunday when you have football, kids and laundry to otherwise distract you.
At times, Segal stretches a little too far, as he did in an otherwise-admirable Sept. 27 piece that focused on how the recession hit close to home in Columbus, Nebraska when a wind-tower plant had layoffs.

You can see management’s unfettered hand in the vaguely Dickensian hours that many here work, and you sense an emphasis on unfettered growth in the just-build-it ethos that governs the stretch of strip malls on the road that bisects the town. It’s fast food, a Wal-Mart, a J. C. Penney, check-cashing outlets and dozens of other stores. The traffic to this generic stretch has come at the apparent expense of a fading but picturesque downtown — a Hopper-esque setting, with a railroad station, some gorgeous early 20th century buildings and a former opera house that is now a minimall.

What does vaguely Dickensian mean, exactly? Segal mentions unions are a non-entity in Nebraska because wages have been pretty good, but Dickensian implies those workers made some kind of Faustian bargain to get that money. If they work more than 40 hours on the floor, they're getting O.T. Nothing Dickensian about that.
Still in all, a great read, and it's does an ink-stained wretch's heart good to see the Times recognizes Segal's talent and lets it run rather than tamp it down because "that's the way we do things around here."
Now if we could just get a few more Haggler columns......

Let's Hope Windows 7 Works Better Than Microsoft's Copyrwriters

Bad Grammar Shouldn't Overshadow Good Product

In a few days, I should have my brand spanking new copy of Windows 7, the OS that's giving Microsoft some long-lost love in the media.
I'm excited, not just because I'm swallowing the hype hook, line and sinker, but because it means good riddance to Vista, which has been the bane of my laptop's existence.
So, it's only proper that Microsoft has given Windows 7 a nice and proper, even peppy ad campaign on multiple platforms, with people claiming credit for claiming all the gee-whiz stuff in Windows 7 was their idea -- like this spot.



The spots work, just like Windows 7.
So it was more than a bit jarring to walk past in Grand Central Terminal a Windows 7 billboard that says "I told them it should require less steps. Now it requires less steps."
Less? Less?
Did they listen to you when you were speaking? And nobody corrected you and told you it was "fewer steps?"
Eeeew.
This is not quite on the level of "Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should." English teachers cringed whenever they heard "like," rather than "as."
But Microsoft is a company that is nothing if not fastidious. Having worked with its PR agency in a previous life, I know words matter to the company.
So should a good editor.
They could use one in a hurry.

At Least Scalia Gets The Language Right

Acid-Tongued Righty Not "Gruntled" About "Choate"

When it comes to judicial philosophy and, well, probably just about anything else, I'm not in sync with Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, the righty power hitter on the Supreme Court bench.
But Scalia's a lover of words, as he makes abundantly clear in many of his tart, acerbic and always-considered opinions. You may not agree with what he writes, but you'll never be bored reading him.
But as the AP's Mark Sherman reports, Scalia decided a language lesson was in order from the bench. His antenna went up when an unwitting attorney said "choate," as an ostensible opposite of "inchoate." Scalia cried foul.
"There is no such adjective. I know we have used it, but there is no such adjective as 'choate.' There is 'inchoate,' but the opposite of 'inchoate' is not 'choate,'" Scalia said
Point taken. The attorney was ready to move on. Scalia was not.
"Any more than the, I don't know," Scalia said. "Exactly. Yes. It's like 'gruntled,'" he said.
The lawyer tried to continue: "But I think I am right on the law, Your Honor."
But Scalia wasn't focusing on the law. He was going to finish his English lesson. "Exactly. 'Disgruntled,'" he said, adding that some people mistakenly assume that "the opposite of 'disgruntled" is 'gruntled.'"
Such are the exchanges that cause lawyers to start drinking heavily after a morning at the Court.