The State of Journalism

According to a new Pew study, from January 2 to April 15, the media’s coverage of Mitt Romney was more than twice as positive than that of President Barack Obama. The results of the extensive study showed that Romney’s coverage was 39 percent positive, while Obama’s coverage was 18 percent positive. As Newsweek/The Daily Beast notes, if anything bad happened during the Republican Primaries, it was Obama’s fault:

‘Day in and day out, he was criticized by the entire Republican field on a variety of policies,’ Mark Jurkowitz, the group’s associate director, says of Obama. ‘And he was inextricably linked to events that generated negative coverage.’

Pew used human researchers to comb 52 newspaper, web, TV and radio sources and computer analysis to scour over 11,000 news outlets to come up with these findings, so maybe this will be enough for Sarah Palin and others to finally give the Lamestream Media a chance.

If nothing else, Pew’s numbers will put LeBron James at ease. Until the playoffs start, that is.

Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

When readers are skimming through a site on their browsers or Twitter feeds, the headline is the only thing that tells them whether a piece is worth their time. So, when tackling headlines for the Web, remember that clarity trumps cleverness (unless you’re writing for the front page of The New York Post).

“Headline writing for the Web isn’t headline writing for magazines — this is the land of the literal,” said Sara Wilson, a senior editor for The Huffington Post.

But that doesn’t mean a headline can’t also be engaging. “You want a strong ‘clicky’ headline that entices readers: a burning question, a big secret, a thing-you-need-to-click-on-this-headline-to-find-out,” she said. “But it should accurately reflect the ideas in the piece, or the readers will be annoyed.”

For eight more tactics on getting your article the buzz it deserves, read 9 Ways to Get More Comments, Tweets and Likes for Your Story.

It’s good to be Greg Smith. The former Goldman Sachs executive who penned the now infamous New York Times op-ed about becoming saddened by the direction of the firm, might get $1 million to write a memoir.

The New York Post reports that Smith is being represented by Paul Fedorko at N.S. Bienstock, a talent agency that specializes in TV and radio, and that Fedorko is currently exploring several offers that could clear the $1 million mark.

Lesson learned? If you’re going to quit, do it in the most spectacular fashion possible and hope you get a book deal out of the resulting mess. Oh, we should add that this only applies to people who can afford to quit in a blaze of glory. Otherwise please stop writing that op-ed now.

On the heels of Pew’s findings that newspapers gain only $1 in digital revenue for every $7 lost in print revenue, we now present to you even more depressing news. The Next Web has found perhaps the saddest traditional media related infographic ever.

A few lowlights:

• Between 2007 and 2010, 13,500 journalists have lost their jobs
• Amazon sells about 115 e-books for every 100 print books
• Just 31 percent of people who read a paper each day read it in print only
• Ful-time newspaper staff is at its lowest point since the 1970s

To view the full infographic, click here. If you’re in the traditional media business, you might not want to. If you do look at it, maybe have a loved one hold your hand while you do. It’s that bad.

Conectando Periodistas is a free subscription service that debuted last month to help connect Hispanic journalists with expert sources for their stories.

Today, the service has launched a website where journalists can post their requests which is then distributed in a daily email alert to subscribers. If the subscriber is a match, then he or she can respond directly to the reporter.

Since its launch last month,  the service says that it has received requests from reporters from Hispanic media outlets including Univision, EFE America, El Diario/La Prensa, Cosmopolitan Latina, and La Opinion and more than 300 experts have subscribed.

In addition to helping Spanish-speaking journalists, Conectando Periodistas also assists English-speaking journalists find Latino sources. Requests from journalists can be submitted anonymously.

Regret the Error, now housed at Poynter, has published the best media errors and corrections, and there are plenty of good ones listed. The Typo of The Year is “Obama/Osama,” because when Osama bin Laden was killed, Obama bin Laden was too. Sadly, we hear Michelle Osama remains at large.

The Error of The Year was the incorrect report that Gabrielle Giffords had been killed when she was shot. For a detailed breakdown of how that spread like wildfire, check here.

Perhaps the best (worst?) mistake came from The Charlotte Observer. It had the honor of having to issue this correction:

A front-page story in some editions Monday incorrectly referred to Osama bin Laden as Obama. In the same story, a photograph cutline wrongly said two aircraft hit the same tower of the World Trade Center. The planes hit different towers.

That’s one hell of a mistake.

According to a new report by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), the number of imprisoned journalists in 2011 was the most since 1996. As of December 1, there were 179 writers, editors, reporters and photographers behind bars, a 34 percent jump from last year.

While jailing declined in the Americas and in Europe, that figure was squashed by the Middle Eastern and North African regions, which accounted for almost 50 percent of the yearly total. Iran put 45 journalists behind bars alone, making it the worst region in the world for imprisonments.

Other trends:

• 78 freelance journalists were jailed, which was the biggest year-to-year jump in the survey in ten years
• For the first time in over a decade, China didn’t lead or co-lead the list
• A majority of jailed journalists were local, being detained by their own governments

For more, check out the full report here.

According to a PRWeek poll, the value placed on an exclusive is fading away fast. Of the 855 surveyed, the journalists working in online media placed very little value on getting the story first, while those working in traditional media found it to still be important. Poynter has the breakdown:

42% of traditional media (newspapers, radio, TV, wires, magazines) find it “extremely important” to be the first to report on a topic via an exclusive or a scoop vs. 25% of online media (bloggers, online news sites)

There were other findings from the survey as well — a majority of media reported that social media has increased their audience and while 58 percent of traditional journalists digest their media online, their online counterparts digest 95 percent of it via the Internet — but let’s stick to the death of the exclusive.

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Last night, at approximately 9:45 pm Eastern Standard Daylight Time, a catastrophe rocked the nation. No, Hot Pockets were not discontinued. The New York Times’ website went down for about 40 minutes. Thankfully people sprang into action, alerting the masses to what had transpired.

The Wrap detailed the horror with, “The web page of the New York Times briefly appeared to be down, with a message reading ‘page not found.’” All Things D lamented, “There’s been no explanation from the media company,” for the crash. Adweek deemed the site being down a “snafu.” Even the Times’ staffers tried to quell the riots that would surely ensue if people realized that they might have to visit another news site for a few minutes.

Eventually the Times’ site came back, but it was too little too late. FishbowlNY hears that Bill Keller took the first flight out of the country once he heard the news. All we know is that he was last seen sipping mai tais on a remote island off the coast of Tortola.

We’re kidding, obviously. It’s just fun to see how something as small as the Times’ site going down for a few minutes is a newsworthy story. But then, we just wrote about it too, didn’t we?

According to the PEJ, Barack Obama is no match for Casey Anthony. Last week Anthony was the top newsmaker, getting mentioned an astonishing 101 times out of about 900 stories surveyed from 52 different media outlets. Obama, despite holding a summit about something called “the national debt,” came in second, with 73 stories.

Let the record show that America – or at least America’s newsrooms – care more about some woman they’ve most likely never met before than a national crisis that impacts pretty much everything and everyone.

If you’d like to start shouting “USA! USA! USA!” now, please do.