I am just back from a seminar at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism in Harvard organized by the Media Center of the American Press Institute. They assembled a big group of bloggers, journalists, online specialists, techwizards (including Craig of Craig’s List and a top exec at Yahoo) who discussed the decline of journalism and the difficulties that online sites have in coming up with a financial model to pay for quality newsgathering.

I have acres of notes, here’s their Live Blog of the event.
http://mediacenter.blogs.com/morph/tmc_event_harvard_symposium_05/index.html

It’s worth perusing. It seemed clear that while bloggers are doing the digging that mainstream journalists should do, there is a much deeper crisis in the business than even I realized. Panic has not set in yet, but if you project the trends….

http://www.mediacenter.org/

These folks are print oriented. What about TV? I am worried. If TV goes too, I am out of a job. How can I be a media critic if there is no media? Frank Rich of the NY Times savaged the TV News Biz (although I wish he would write about and support the initiatives many of us are promoting for media reform.

FRANK RICH: THE NEWS IS MISSING

“What’s missing from News is the news. On ABC, Peter Jennings devotes two hours of prime time to playing peek-a-boo with U.F.O. fanatics, a whorish stunt crafted to deliver ratings, not information. On NBC, Brian Williams is busy as all get-out, as every promo reminds us, “Reporting America’s Story.” That story just happens to be the relentless branding of Brian Williams as America’s anchorman - a guy just too in love with Folks Like Us to waste his time looking closely at, say, anything happening in Washington.

“In this environment, it’s hard to know whom to root for. After the “60 Minutes” fiasco, Mr. Williams’s boss, the NBC president Jeff Zucker, piously derided CBS for its screw-up, bragging of the reforms NBC News instituted after a producer staged a truck explosion for a “Dateline NBC” segment in 1992. “Nothing like that could have gotten through, at any level,” Mr. Zucker said of the CBS National Guard story, “because of the safeguards we instituted more than a decade ago.” Good for him, but it’s not as if a lot else has gotten through either. When was the last time Stone Phillips delivered a scoop, with real or even fake documents, on “Dateline”? Or that NBC News pulled off an investigative coup as stunning as the “60 Minutes II” report on Abu Ghraib? That, poignantly enough, was Mr. Rather’s last hurrah before he, too, and through every fault of his own, became a neutered newsman.

There’s more. Much more. Read the whole piece.

I was amazed that the Harvard conference showed us the work of a non-journalist journalist commenting on flaws in journalism Who? Who else?

John Stewart:
http://clips.mediamatters.org/video/dailyshow-200503040002.mov

LAURIE GARRET TO NEWSDAY: SAYONARA BABY

Meanwhile thoughtful journalists are bailing out. Here’s Pulitzer Prize winner Laurie Garret of Newsday, one of the world’s top reporters on AIDS. I have quoted her before. She had a leave of absence and is not coming back. Editor and Publisher reports:

“Laurie Garrett, the prize-winning Newsday reporter, left the Melville, N.Y., paper Monday with a blistering memo to her colleagues that may provoke debate elsewhere in the newspaper industry.

“Garrett, whose leave of absence allowing her to work at the Council on Foreign Relations ends March 8, announced that she would not be returning to her paper largely because’ her work at the Council had proven to be the most exciting challenge of her life. But clearly there were other circumstances as well.

“‘Ever since the Chandler Family plucked Mark Willes from General Foods, placing him at the helm of Times Mirror with a mandate to destroy the institutions in ways that would boost dividends, journalism ha suffered at Newsday,’ she wrote in the memo, which was posted at the Poynter Institute’s Romenesko site. ‘The pain of the last year actually began a decade ago: the sad arc of greed has finally hit bottom. The leaders ofTimes Mirror and Tribune have proven to be mirrors of a general trend in the media world: They serve their stockholders first, Wall St. second and somewhere far own the list comes service to newspaper readerships.’

‘The deterioration we experienced at Newsday was hardly unique,” she wrote in the memo, describing the past few years. “All across America news organizations have been devoured by massive corporations, and allegiance to stockholders, the drive for higher share prices, and push for larger dividend returns trumps everything that the grunts in the newsrooms consider their missions. Long gone are the days of fast-talking, whiskey- swilling Murray Kempton peers eloquently filling columns with daily dish on government scandals, mobsters and police corruption. The sort of in-your- face challenge that the Fourth Estate once posed for politicians has been replaced by mud-slinging, lies and, where it ought not be, timidity…”

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000819198

APPLE VERSUS THE BLOGGERS

Veteran tech writer Dan Gilmor writes: “Apple Computer’s disgusting attack on three online journalism sites, in a witch hunt to find out who (if anyone) inside the company leaked information about allegedly upcoming products, has taken a nasty turn. Too bad it’s not surprising — and journalists of all kinds should be paying attention.

“A judge in California has decided that the sites don’t qualify as “journalism” (AP) under state law and/or the First Amendment. By his bizarre and dangerous standard, I apparently stopped being a journalist the day I left my newspaper job after a quarter-century of writing for newspapers. (Note: At the request of lawyers for the sites, I’ve filed declarations — here (104k PDF) and here (1MB PDF) — saying that in my opinion these sites are performing a journalistic function. I haven’t been paid to do so.)

“Apple’s bullying is bad enough. But the California case is just one of several harbingers of trouble for the online journalism world.

http://dangillmor.typepad.com/

LAW SUIT OF THE WEEK

Press Release: “Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, announced today that it has filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia seeking records under the provisions of the Freedom of Info! rmation Act (ìFOIAî), 5 U.S.C. ‘ 552, from the Department of Defense concerning Pentagon funded programs engaged in ìstrategic influence, perception management, strategic information warfare and/or strategic psychological operationsî through media consultants, “think tanks,” foreign expatriate political organizations and Internet sites. Judicial Watch filed its FOIA request with the Pentagon on March 23, 2004. Following eight (8) requests for a status update, several phone calls and Judicial Watch offers to accept incremental production of the requested records, the Pentagon produced only two (2) spreadsheets listing Defense Department contracts. Judicial Watch was forced to file suit on February 25, 2005.