The 2013 Mirror Awards finalists have been announced. The awards highlight excellence in media reporting. The winners will be announced Wednesday, June 5, at Cipriani. Congrats to all those nominated.

Best Single Article – Traditional/Legacy Media

• Ken Auletta, “Citizens Jain,” The New Yorker
• Jeff Bercovici, “The Next Media Jackpot: The Fight For The $1 Trillion Hispanic Market,” Forbes
• Joe Hagan, “Truth or Consequences,” Texas Monthly
• Tara Murtha, “How Two Photojournalists Are Taking on the City’s Gun Crisis,” Philadelphia Weekly
• Chris Robbins, “An udder mess: How the Atlantic got it all wrong in St. Lawrence County,” Watertown Daily Times
• John Seabrook, “Streaming Dreams,” The New Yorker

Best Single Article – Digital Media

• Michael Calderone, “At The 2012 Conventions, 15,000 Journalists Search For A Story,” Huffington Post
• Joe Eskenazi, “Top 5 Ways Bleacher Report Rules the World!,” SF Weekly
• Hugh Hart, “Fast-Frame Hobbit Dangles Prospect of Superior Cinema, But Will Theaters Bite?,” Wired
• Adrienne LaFrance “How to make your journalism project succeed on Kickstarter,” Nieman Journalism Lab
• Bret Schulte, “‘This is my paper. This is my town‘,” Columbia Journalism Review
• Joe Strupp, “How A Right-Wing Group Is Infiltrating State News Coverage,” MediaMatters

‘She’s a sponge’

Joe Hagan‘s 6,000-word New York profile of Katie Couric is generating quite a reaction. Here’s an alleged Couric producer’s take:

—–Original Message—–
From: Anonymous Tips [mailto:fishbowlny@mediabistro.com]
Sent: Monday, July 09, 2007 4:53 PM
To: tvnewser@mediabistro.com
Subject: FISHBOWLNY Tip sent 7/9/2007 3:52:55 PM

This notion that Katie “wings it” for interviews is absurd. Katie prides herself on her preparation for everything, especially for interviews… And she’s a sponge. I’m always amazed at her ability to retain every piece of research she’s read. As for questions, Katie always insists on seeing a suggested list in advance and goes through them with me prior to the interview. If she goes off the page, it’s because the suggestions on that list prompted more thoughtful, more important questions in her mind. That’s why she’s on the air, and not me. — CBS Producer

EARLIER:

New York‘s 6,000-word Katie Couric profile dropped this morning. Joe Hagan covered the bases: the drop in ratings; the claims of fluff content (Couric on Suri Cruise: “Yessiree, she does exist!”); the allegations of sexism. But let’s get to the salient points of the article:

• Why did Leslie Moonves offer Couric the job? Because he “wanted to attract new audiences to the evening news by making it more like entertainment, envisioning a broadcast that was somewhere in between The Naked News, a British TV show in which beautiful women undress as they read the headlines, and ‘two boring people behind a desk.’”

• Couric’s hairdresser, Mela Murphy, told a deputy assignment editor at CBS News’ foreign desk that Couric’s producers were “lucky to have their jobs” after Murphy wasn’t given first-class plane tickets with Couric to work on-site in Jordan.
• Couric’s salary? Somewhere between $15 million and $22 million. Staffers and producers grouse they aren’t getting raises because Couric’s pay eats up too much of the Evening News‘ budget.
• CBS News staff has been butting heads with Couric and blocking her from high profile interviews and enterprise stories: Trips to Iraq and Afghanistan were turned down; when Elizabeth Edwards personally requested Couric interview her after she discovered her cancer returned, CBS initially blocked it because they thought “the news value had passed.”
• That story the Philadelphia Inquirer‘s Gail Shister broke claiming CBS was going to let Couric go after the 2008 elections? It’s implied Couric thinks Bob Schieffer was Shister’s source.
• Dan Rather: Moonves believes “the audience is redneck.”

Oh, and Couric once assaulted a staffer:

Read more

If you’re into this sort of thing, some fascinating meta-media notes on Joe Hagan‘s piece on Time magazine in this week’s New York mag:

Editor Richard Stengel tells Hagan he wants Time to be a bit more like the Economist. Time Inc. editor-in-chief John Huey does not: “Well, that’s not the magazine we’re making. To say that we’re going down that road is not where we’re going.” Stengel later amends his description.

Stengel calls new Time columnist Joel Stein “a god to people in their twenties and thirties.”

Huey on his Time legacy: “Ex-CEOs don’t mean spit. And neither do ex-editors-in-chief.”

Read more