The State of Journalism

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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According to the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, the Anthony Weiner case accounted for 17 percent of all news coverage last week. The Congressman’s uh, situation, easily beat out the second and third most-reported stories, the economy and Middle East unrest, respectively.

Despite the extended reports and Weiner acting as stupid as possible, his case failed to become the most covered political scandal since 2007:

The biggest political scandal of the last four and a half years was former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich’s corruption case (28%)—also known as “Blago-gate”—in which he allegedly tried to sell President Barack Obama’s former senate seat. No 2 was former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s admission that he used prostitutes (23%), followed quickly by his resignation from that office.  News of former Idaho Senator Larry Craig’s arrest for lewd behavior in an airport was the No. 3 scandal, at 18%. Craig ultimately pled guilty to lesser charges.

It’s not over yet, though. With the Congressman going to rehab and still refusing to resign, there’s the chance that he could become the most covered scandal. FishbowlNY has faith that Weiner will rise to the occasion.

Matthew Lasar at Ars Technica writes about the fact that the Federal Communications Commission has come up with a term for the “ever growing set of digital duties” that journalists must perform: “hamsterization.” He asks: “Hey there newspaper reporter—has your broadband-powered job got you filing not only conventional stories, but blogging, video blogging, Facebooking, podcasting, picture posting, and Tweeting?”

If you answered yes, you are not alone. The FCC notes in its just released report on The Information Needs of Communities that “these additional responsibilities—and having to learn the new technologies to execute them—are time-consuming, and come at a cost.” Journalists now “typically face rolling deadlines as they post to their newspaper’s website before, and after, writing print stories.”

These “rolling deadlines” is where the hamster wheel metaphor comes in. The observation was first made by Dean Starkman in a Columbia Journalism Review piece titled “The Hamster Wheel.” Lasar writes:

The “Hamster Wheel” isn’t about speed, the report quotes Starkman as saying. “It’s motion for motion’s sake… volume without thought. It is news panic, a lack of discipline, an inability to say no.”

Journalists complain that where newsrooms used to reward in-depth stories, “now incentives skew toward work that can be turned around quickly and generate a bump in Web traffic.”

We have no idea what the FCC plans to do about this. But at the very least,  it’s nice to be acknowledged.

There’s been an explosion of online news reporting, but amid all this abundance, an extreme shortage is emerging. According to the New York Times, a recent federal study has shown that local reporting is suffering to the point that we are actually hurting democracy! “Coverage of state governments and municipalities has receded at such an alarming pace that it has left government with more power than ever to set the agenda and have assertions unchallenged,” the Times concludes.

The purpose of the study was to “assess the health of the media industry” and “determine whether government policies that affect the industry are in sync in the digital age.” But what it actually revealed was that cutbacks in local reporting and newspapers have had a massive ripple effect through the media system, eroding important local coverage. And there is little to be done about it, until the local news industry somehow becomes more robust.

Steven Waldman, a former journalist for Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report journalist, joked about what could be done to the Times: “A ban on press releases?”

A joke, but perhaps an interesting theory. In the absence of unbiased information, is no information an improvement?

The jewelry industry and Tiffany & Co. haven’t done nearly enough to perpetuate the myth that buying someone expensive things is the only way to prove your true love, so Tiffany & Co. is launching editorial content to help everything along.

The microsite “What Makes Love True” will launch at some point today, and according to WWD it will include “a forum where users can share the places their ‘hearts beat faster’ in New York City, restaurant, cocktail and culture suggestions” and other original content.

If your significant other is already obsessed with Tiffany’s, we suggest keeping them away from this new site, or pay the price.

Literally.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has released its 2011 Impunity Index – a tool that calculates unsolved journalists murders – and once again Iraq is at the top of the list, with 92 unresolved killings.

The countries found on the list are typically wrought with excessive corruption in all levels of the government and law enforcement, making covering any news there virtually impossible:

CPJ research shows that deadly, unpunished violence against journalists often leads to vast self-censorship in the rest of the press corps. From Somalia to Mexico, CPJ has found that journalists avoid sensitive topics, leave the profession, or flee their homeland to escape violent retribution.

The rest of the top ten most deadly countries for journalists:

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