All quiet on TV woes

From The New York Times, this is a pretty interesting story on a University of Pennsylvania study (and it's strikingly relevant to our blog here.) Apparently, newspapers' demise makes good news. The flight of broadcast viewers? Not so much. 

Here's a snippet from The Times: 

In the newspapers, they found 900 articles about the drop in newspaper circulation and 95 about the shrinking audience for the broadcast networks’ newscasts. The TV news shows had 38 reports on falling newspaper readership and only 6 about the falling audience for national news broadcasts.

This is UPenn's press release. At the bottom, it says the report is available on the Web site, but good luck finding it.

Wallace v. Clinton worth revisiting

MarketWatch's Jon Friedman has this interview/profile/puff piece on Fox News Sunday's Chris Wallace, focusing on Wallace's tense 2006 interview with Bill Clinton, who now-famously exploded when asked why he hadn't done more to catch Osama bin Laden.

Friedman, in the story, calls Wallace "always calm and tough, but fair and well-prepared. He also treats his subjects with respect." Judge for yourself below. It's a good excuse to watch again.

A future of news

Howard Kurtz has this at washingtonpost.com, an uncharacteristically pessimistic reflection on the future of the newspaper, that "daily compendium delivered to your doorstep" Kurtz has spent his whole life working for and, unsurprisingly, finds "indispensable." I suppose Chrysler factory workers find Chrysler factories "indispensable," too.

A big chunk here:

Newspaper folks may have an inflated view of their self-importance, but what they do has an impact beyond their readers and advertisers. Local TV isn't likely to expose a crooked mayor, as the Detroit Free Press did. Bloggers aren't going to reveal secret CIA prisons.

"Society doesn't need newspapers. What we need is journalism," Shirky argues. That is way too glib. The online cacophony that would follow the demise of newspapers would be fast, furious and fun, insightful and opinionated. But let's face it: Who would pay for a Baghdad bureau, or even a bureau in Albany or Annapolis?

I still have the buffet mentality, the idea that news, sports, entertainment and so on can make for a tasty package. Buffet folks like to get a fill, a briefing, a contextual sense of what's important. But so many others in the iTunes age would rather cherry-pick, clicking on one story and rushing off, window shoppers who rarely come inside.

A little condescending, maybe, Mr. Kurtz? Like it or not, the days of deciding what's front page news for everybody is over. I confess: I fall into the category of people Kurtz calls cherry pickers. And why shouldn't I get my Red Sox news in the Boston Globe, politics in Washington and business in New York? Heavy on nogstalgia, Kurtz is light on ideas about how to capitalize on newspapers' new reality, even though those papers, with professional reporters and historically high readerships, are obviously in a unique position to compete and as able to innovate as anybody.


Instead, Kurtz asks,

But what about the old rolled-up, flip-through-the-pages, take-it-on-the-subway product? In a world where the most obscure factoid can be searched in seconds, is most of America now immune to those charms?

Yes. Isn't it time to get over it?




A related extra here....This comes from a Q&A with The Post's newest Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, Eugene Robinson. Kind of nasty question followed by a great answer.

Alexandria, Va.: Newspapers are going the way of the buggy whip-- there is simply no use for them anymore, except perhaps by the retired, unemployed or independently wealthy who have the time necessary to wade through them. The handwriting on the wall is obvious. Why try to save them? (Besides the obvious self-preservation answer.) There will be no dearth of commentary concerning the state of our democracy on the Internet and in other media.

Eugene Robinson: Nearly 700,000 people buy The Washington Post every day -- and considerably more on Sundays. Obviously they're not all retired, unemployed or wealthy -- but what would it matter if they were? What business sense would it make not to sell them a newspaper?

This is Robinson's original column on the Times Co./Globe negotiations, from which this Q&A originated.

Jon Friedman's big battle

In this one, MarketWatch's media critic Jon Friedman takes on the task of explaining how The Washington Post  and Politico are drawing battle lines over political coverage in Washington. Or does he? 

The story never gets around to telling readers whether Politico is actually gaining ground on The Post. In fact, in his last section - awkwardly named "Dessert vs. appetizers" - Friedman even seems to backtrack. Here's what reads like the theory of the piece:

The challenge for Politico is to sustain its momentum at times when political news can be overshadowed by, say, the worldwide fear of a swine flu epidemic or even such flukes as the low-flying plane that fascinated and terrified New Yorkers on Monday.

Then here's Friedman, in the very next line, contending that Politico......um.....can't sustain momentum.

The Post averages 10.6 million unique visitors per month. The Post noted recently that Politico hit 4.6 million unique visitors last October -- when the public's fascination with the presidential race was at its peak level -- and now claims about 3 million.

Politico has lost 35 percent of its visits in recent months, Friedman? So where's the story?? And "rival"? Bottom line, seems like Friedman got a story out of Washington media small-talk on a slow news day. That may be bearable if we weren't left with this:

MEDIA WEB QUESTION OF THE DAY: What do you like or dislike about Politico and the Washington Post? 

OK then.

Sullivan on NYT flip

Check this out. Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Dish, an occasional media critic, has a scathing post about The New York Times' double-standard on torture talk. Definitely a must-read this one.