The State of Journalism

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.

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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.

Earlier today, we aggregated curated an Ad Age post by Simon Dumenco, where he described how Huffington Post’s aggregation of his article gave it only a meager bump in traffic, calling into question HuffPo’s rationale that aggregation drives major traffic to smaller sites. FishbowlNY itself noted that HuffPo’s aggregated version of Dumenco’s piece was around 250 words long — and the original article was about 676 words — so we weren’t surprised that HuffPo’s near full-on rewriting enticed only a few to check out the original piece.

HuffPo took notice. Poynter has posted an email to Dumenco from HuffPo Executive Business Editor Peter Goodman, in which Goodman apologizes for this “unacceptable” occurrence (great!) and adds that “the writer of the offending post has been suspended indefinitely” (what?!) The full email is below the jump.

This has struck some as an extreme, even aggravating reaction. For one, many who might want to speak publicly about their experiences with HuffPo may now prefer to hold back out of fear of getting a writer — who seems to have just been doing her  job — fired.  Choire Sicha writes at The Awl, “This is along the lines of arresting hookers instead of johns, or drug users instead of drug importers, or something.” He goes on to write:

The writer, who seems to be Yale class of (something fairly recent), Amy Lee, was doing pretty much what she’d been trained to do, either overtly or covertly, and she took the fall for the HuffPo, which is so obviously baloney… So the Huffington Post thinks it gets off clean from these entrenched practices by temporarily canning a smart young person who’s doing one of their terrible jobs as a way to get into writing and as a way to pay bills. It shouldn’t.

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The Huffington Post defends its use of aggregation in part by claiming that it drives major traffic to the sites featuring the original stories, so it’s in a happy, symbiotic relationship with the media at large. But is this really true? At Ad Age, Simon Dumenco presents his personal case study on the dark arts of aggregation. He wrote a post last month titled “Poor Steve Jobs Had to Go Head to Head With Weinergate in the Twitter Buzzstakes. And the Weiner Is …” His post was picked up by Techmeme, a site that takes a sparse approach to amassing content from around the web (usually gives just a headline and a couple of sentences) and The Huffington Post, which gave a “short but thorough paraphrasing/rewriting” of the original post.

Did HuffPo cause a traffic explosion for his post? Not quite.

So what does Google Analytics for AdAge.com tell us? Techmeme drove 746 page views to our original item. HuffPo — which of course is vastly bigger than Techmeme — drove 57 page views.

57 page views hardly seems like enough traffic to keep writers from getting grumpy that their work is being aggregated. Moreover, the low traffic drive doesn’t seem particularly surprising. His original post is not very lengthy, coming in at around 676 words without the charts. The Huffington Post version is around 250 words, more than enough space to adequately cover all the major points. So what would be the purpose of clicking through to read the original piece? With Techmeme, however, if the article seems interesting, the user must click through to the original post.

We’d be interested to hear from other writers about traffic bumps from HuffPo to determine if Arianna Huffington‘s traffic defense is something of a myth.

The feud between The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal is alive and well, even if a lot of the fighting is about meaningless stuff. The latest example comes from the Times’ reporter Michael Barbaro. Apparently Barbaro was mad that the Journal wrote about Anthony Weiner’s wife being pregnant without crediting the Times for breaking the story.

This is obviously a very important news item, so the public must know who reported it first. Barbaro, replying to the lack of credit, tweeted, “For second time in two weeks, WSJ borrows NYT reporting on Weiner without attribution, ending era of courtesy.”

The New York Observer reports that the Journal then published an Op-Ed that irked Barbaro even more, because the piece didn’t mention the Times. Barbaro, seemingly taking the bait, tweeted a link to the offending story along with “WSJ, furthering no NYT mention policy, refers obliquely to ‘Manhattan broadsheet’ in editorial; mentions NY Sun by name.”

FishbowlNY thinks Barbaro needs a hobby. Or five.

Yesterday FishbowlNY told you about the fascinating revelation by Jose Antonio Vargas that he was an illegal immigrant. We also mentioned that a piece by Vargas would be published in the upcoming New York Times Magazine, and as the day went on, we found out that The Washington Post had passed on the story.

It was a puzzling decision, especially since it’s such an interesting tale and Vargas had won a Pulitzer for his work at the Post. Today, we get some insight into why, exactly, the paper let Vargas’ story go to another outlet. Apparently the piece was all set to run in the Post’s Outlook section, when concerns over some facts in Vargas’ article arose:

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Admittedly, we are a couple of days late to this story, but we still find it moving enough to share. Last week, a writer for The Faster Times, Oliver Miller, wrote a much-read article called “AOL Hell: An AOL Content Slave Speaks Out.” In it, he writes about the perils of the “AOL Way,” the grind of writing ten articles daily, keeping up a 25 minutes per article turn-around time on unfamiliar subjects, the stress and  sleepless nights, and the general misery of being a content slave for a company that doesn’t care about what you write, as long as you mention Lady Gaga in almost every headline. Then he shares the story of how he got fired:

At this point, during the course of writing my ten daily articles, I made an ironic aside about a Hollywood star — implying that he was jealous that another star had won a major award. It was meant to be a joke. It was meant to be ironic — but of course, the Internet is the place where irony goes to die…

The Hollywood star was not amused. He wrote an article bitching about the stupidity of AOL, and about the stupidity of the AOL home page, and about the stupidity of me in particular.  In fact, he said that I was an “eighth-degree black belt idiot.”

The star in question, the New York Observer first points out, is the highly popular (even Miller calls himself a fan) Alec Baldwin, potential mayoral candidate, who was a paid spokesperson of AOL.  In the words of the Observer, Baldwin “then used his vanity blog at The Huffington Post to trash AOL for taking him too literally in an unrelated end note to a post about the documentary Waiting For Superman.” There, he does indeed refer to “eighth degree, black belt idiots that compose the AOL homepage” and goes on to say “I’m still a loyal AOL user. In spite of the fact that its homepage content is written by the dumbest bastards in the world.”

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