Bay Area Journos

The Northern California Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) has released its 2009 Excellence in Journalism Awards, and KALW News Director Holly Kernan took top honors, as Journalist of the Year.

From the SPJ: "Amid unprecedented layoffs of journalists throughout the region and continued shrinkage of many media outlets in Northern California, Kernan had the audacity and drive to expand KALW's ambitious weekly newsmagazine, Crosscurrents, to a daily format, winning national attention and a devoted audience. Under Kernan's guidance, Crosscurrents has stepped in -- expanding as others recede -- to provide essential coverage of local news and culture for Bay Area communities. Operating on a shoestring budget, Kernan leads a team of reporters in putting together a quality news program with a focus on covering underserved communities."

The San Jose Mercury News won four awards, the San Francisco Chronicle three, the Oakland Tribune two.

Winners will be honored at a 6 p.m. awards dinner on November 10, 2009 at Jillian's restaurant in San Francisco. For details of recipients and their projects, visit the SPJ Web site. Full list of awards after the break.

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Back at the beginning of July, the New Yorker published a scathing review by Malcolm Gladwell of Chris Anderson's Free. Which led to some verbal fisticuffs back from Anderson.

After ascertaining that this wasn't some faux fight manufactured by dasterdly marketing geniuses at Conde Nast (home to both the New Yorker and Anderson's Wired), Six Apart co-founder Anil Dash has come to a not-so-flattering conclusion about the source of Gladwell's ire.

The core of Gladwell's argument is simple: "Free" fails to provide data to support its claims about the future of pricing, using anecdote and confident assertion in place of actual evidence. In his objection to this methodology, Gladwell seems uncharacteristically strident, compared to his usual measured tones. Whenever I see somebody getting their dander up, I think of one of the first things I ever blogged about ten years ago: We hate most in others that which we fail to see in ourselves.

...

I can't help but wonder if being ceaselessly criticized for using assertions and anecdotes in lieu of hard statistical data has left [Gladwell] much more inclined to criticize others for using the same technique.

Photo credits: merlinmann (Dash), Pop!Tech (Gladwell), Pop!Tech (Anderson)

(H/t Silicon Alley Insider)

It doesn't get any bigger than this as far as Bay Area sports media is concerned: On Sunday, longtime Giants beat writer Nick Peters was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.

Covering his first Giants game in 1958, the year they moved to San Francisco, Peters, 70, ended up covering nearly 5,000 Giants games in all -- more than anyone, ever. For that he was awarded the prestigious J.G. Taylor Spink Award and recognized for perpetuity in the library's "Scribes and Mikemen" exhibit. Peters, who spent most of his career with the Sacramento Bee after starting out with the Chronicle, is only the sixth West Coast journalist and the second from Northern California, after longtime Chronicle sportswriter Bob Stevens.

"A reporter is never supposed to be part of the story," he said in his acceptance speech, "so I'm a little uncomfortable."

He also spoke about his father, who immigrated from Greece "to live the 'American Dream,' " he said. "I'm not sure he lived it, but he made sure my sister and I did."

Watch video of his speech here.

From the Online Journalism blog: Wired editor Chris Anderson's book, "Free: The Future of a Radical Price," can now be read . . . free online, on Scribd.

Here's to Anderson practicing what he preaches. Feel free to take a gander at all 288 pages.

FREE (full book) by Chris Anderson

Neil MacFarquhar, the New York Times' UN bureau chief, was once based in San Francisco. He was back in the Bay Area this week to talk about his latest book, "The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday: Unexpected Encounters in the Changing Middle East."

He was interviewed on KQED's Forum on Tuesday, and told the following story about how he tried to hit upon the title of the book at a party he threw in San Francisco:

I wanted to convey the fact that it's not a heavy policy tome. I'm not giving prescriptions on how to solve all the problems in the Middle East, but I also discuss some serious issues in there. I couldn't come up with the title, so I had a title party here in San Francisco, where I was living as I finished the book. I fed a lot of friends a bunch of red wine and food and we threw some of paper on the wall, and everybody wrote and shouted out their favorite titles, like, "Waiter there's a fly in my hummus," and "Baksheesh: The quest for change in the Middle East." [According to Wikipedia, Baksheesh is a term used to describe tipping, charitable giving, and certain forms of political corruption and bribery in the Middle East.] But my editor rejected all of those, and it ctually comes from the book itself. When you work in Hezbollah ountry, and the areas that they control, from Beirut and south of the ountry, they make you fill out a bunch of paperwork, and one of the uestions is what is your birthday, and then on my birthday I got an e-mail from hizbollah@hizbollah.org . . . It was a little poem.

The incident, to MacFarquhar, helped show that Hizbollah is not purely a terrorist organization, but something that provides schools, clinics and housing for impoverished people who have nothing else. The U.S. was trying to wean farmers off hashish and provide them with dairy cows, but Hizbollah (using the organization's own spelling) got Iran to donate more cows. Whenever a U.S. cow got sick, Hizbollah would put it on its television channel and use it as propaganda.

The full interview is here.

First for Chris Anderson, editor of San Francsico-based Wired Magazine, was the revalation that he pinched portions of his new book, "Free: The Future of a Radical Price," directly from Wikipedia. Now comes a spitting match with Malcolm Gladwell.

It started with Gladwell's 2,700-word review of the book in the July 6 issue of The New Yorker, in which the famously heady author dismisses many of Anderson's theories about free being the go-to price for idea-based commerce in the future.

Writes Gladwell: "The (New York) Times gives away its content on its Web site. But the Wall Street Journal has found that more than a million subscribers are quite happy to pay for the privilege of reading online. Broadcast television -- the original practitioner of Free -- is struggling. But premium cable, with its stiff monthly charges for specialty content, is doing just fine. Apple may soon make more money selling iPhone downloads (ideas) than it does from the iPhone itself (stuff). The company could one day give away the iPhone to boost downloads; it could give away the downloads to boost iPhone sales; or it could continue to do what it does now, and charge for both. Who knows? The only iron law here is the one too obvious to write a book about, which is that the digital age has so transformed the ways in which things are made and sold that there are no iron laws."

"In Gladwell's review," writes Ryan Tate in Valleywag, "Anderson is constantly making imaginary pronouncements, which make him look like an idiot. He wants to turn the New York Times into Meals on Wheels, run entirely by volunteers! What a jerk. He says a free price is like 'magic!' What??"

Today, Anderson hit back.

In an article titled, "Dear Malcolm, Why So Threatened?," Anderson says that Gladwell's focus on the book's argument for free journalism (just one of many made by Anderson in his book) was "parochial," and points out the irony in the fact that Gladwell's review is posted free on the New Yorker's Web site.

He also relays the story of Ken Denmead, a Bay Area civil engineer working on the BART extention. Anderson started the parenting blog GeekDad about three years ago, but put out an open call for help when its upkeep became too much for him to handle alone. Denmead responded, and was so affective in his role that Anderson turned over the entire operation to him. The editor's summary thesis:

Wired.com makes good money selling ads on GeekDad (it's very popular with advertisers)

Ken gets a nominal retainer, but has also managed to parlay GeekDad into a book deal and a lifelong dream of being a writer

The other contributors largely write for free, although if one of their posts becomes insanely popular they'll get a few bucks. None of them are doing it for the money, but instead for the fun, audience and satisfaction of writing about something they love and getting read by a lot of people.

"Is it the model for the newspaper industry?" writes Anderson. "Maybe not all of it, but it is the only way I can think of to scale the economics of media down to the hyperlocal level. And I can imagine far more subjects that are better handled by well-coordinated amateurs than those that can support professional journalists. My business card says 'Editor in Chief,' but if one of my children follows in my footsteps, I suspect their business card will say 'Community Manager.' Both can be good careers."

One can only hope that Gladwell -- who recently participated in a three part series with ESPN.com columnist Bill Simmons in which the two traded hypotheses in a 9,000-word argument about various sports topics -- is up for a similar challenge with Anderson.

We're willing to wait.

You know Josh Wolf. He's the independent blogger and journalist who spent over seven months in jail because he refused to surrender to authorities unpublished footage that he'd shot at an anti-G8 demonstration in San Francisco in 2005.

The Media That Matters Film Festival has a beautifully shot, short documentary (5:29) about Wolf that you can watch online.

"I'm not real big on being the record holder on something, but I'm hoping... that nobody ever has to be incarcerated again, certainly not as long as I was, for defending the rights of journalists," Wolf says in the film.

"Lone Wolf," by Jason Sussberg

(Via Steve Rhodes)