Morning Reading List, 08.01.07

Patrick — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 08:50:43 +0000

Good morning Washington.

An ABC release announced “ABC’s ‘World News with Charles Gibson’ was back in the top spot for the week of July 23-27, ranking #1 among Total Viewers, Households and Adults 25-54. This marks the thirteenth time in fourteen weeks that ‘World News’ has finished first in these categories. The ABC broadcast averaged 7.53 million Total Viewers and a 1.8/8 among Adults 25-54, outperforming NBC’s ‘Nightly News’ by 360,000 Total Viewers and 130,000 key demo viewers.”

TVNewser reports, “MSNBC has now beaten CNN four weeks straight in the 25-54 sales prime demo. An MSNBC spokesperson tells TVNewser ‘this is the first time MSNBC has beaten CNN for the month in six years (August 2001).’ For the month, MSNBC had 195,000 viewers in sales prime, CNN had 189,000.”

“The nation’s effort to combat terrorism was not the biggest story last week, according to PEJ’s News Coverage Index from July 22-27. That designation went to the 2008 Presidential campaign, which filled 12% of the newshole, and was fueled by the July 23 CNN/YouTube debate. The continuing showdown between the Democratic-led Congress and beleaguered attorney general Alberto Gonzales was the second-biggest story at 6%.”

Last month we told you to check out The Charm Offensive with Alex Daniels from the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, AOL’s Geordie Grindle, AARP editor Meg Guroff and CQ’s Chris Lehmann. Well, Daniels is back again, this time with her other band, Julie Ocean. Along with Terry Banks from Fleishman Hilliard, Jim Spellman at CNN and Hunter Bennet from Esquire, Julie Ocean is playing Thursday night at The Black Cat.

OffTheBus, a collaboration between Huffington Post and New Assignment, is showing “PressThink readers how pro-am journalism is developing in NewAssignment.Net’s second major project. At this stage — two weeks in — we’re still establishing blogging standards for open platform campaign journalism. The instructions steer away from a rigid divide between news and opinion, replacing it with posts that make an original contribution vs. those that don’t because not enough went into them.”

E&P’s Steve Outing writes, “For consumers of news and searchers of information, these are heady times. Yet there’s a huge downside to this abundance: How as consumers do we know if we can trust what we read? How do we know if it’s balanced, or serving someone’s narrow agenda?”

Variety takes a look at Joanne Lipman, who “after landing the highest post ever held by a woman at the Wall Street Journal,” she “did the unthinkable: She left.”

PRWeek writes, “It seems counterintuitive that HuffPo — once pigeonholed as the ‘liberal Drudge Report,’ now evolving into a full-fledged online news and opinion clearinghouse — could play host to the musings of business leaders who would not be surprised to find their capitalist predilections railed against by the site’s commenters. However, the two-year-old site, which Technorati ranks as one of the top five blogs on the Web, is aggressively pushing to establish itself as a premier national forum for thoughts and opinions of all stripes.”

“MSNBC ‘The Big Story In July’”

Inside Higher Ed reports, “NSSE has just asked all of the colleges that participated at least once in the last three years (a total of about 1,000 four-year institutions) for permission to release five benchmark scores from the engagement survey’s report for their institutions to USA Today, which may place the data online. Both NSSE and USA Today have stressed that they are not trying to create a new ranking system, and that institutions would not be ranked. Rather, the effort is an attempt to provide more ‘meaningful indicators’ about colleges that students and parents could use.”

Variety reports, “With her sociopolitical website, Arianna Huffington wants to give voice to the face in the crowd. ‘There’s a kind of wisdom of the crowd that really is one of the great contributions online journalism can make,’ she says.”

Jobs

Nonfiction author seeks part-time DC research assistant.

The Advisory Board Company is seeking an Associate Editor.

Need To Know News, LLC is looking for an administrative assistant.

Hat Tips: DCRTV, TVNewser, IWantMedia, Romenesko, MediaBistro, JournalismJobs, JournalismNext

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Meg Guroff - FishbowlDC

Morning Reading List, 08.01.07