New York Times, Elitist, Corrupt

New York Times, Elitist, Corrupt; the sooner it dies the better for everyone --

The New York Times endorsed a secretive trade agreement that the public can’t read: " . . . But as Sutton points out, it seems strange for the Times to be opining on a treaty the public hasn't gotten to see yet. If the Times has gotten a leaked copy of the report, it should publish it so the public can make up its own mind. If it hasn't seen the treaty, perhaps it should reserve judgment until it's learned what's actually in it."

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The Internet, Writing, Ideas

‘Smarter Than You Think,’ by Clive Thompson - NYTimes.com: ". . . “Before the Internet came along, most people rarely wrote anything at all for pleasure or intellectual satisfaction after graduating from high school or college,” Thompson notes. “This is something that’s particularly hard to grasp for professionals whose jobs require incessant writing, like academics, journalists, lawyers or marketers. For them, the act of writing and hashing out your ideas seems commonplace. But until the late 1990s, this simply wasn’t true of the average nonliterary person.” More important, the writing produced in the new world of blogs and tweets is being done, at least ostensibly, for public discourse and reaction. It may not be getting us back to the dialectic of Socrates’ agora, but at least it produces a more stimulating and interactive realm than existed before the Internet."

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Glenn Greenwald, Digital Content, Data, Leaks

Glenn Greenwald and the Future of Leaks: "Glenn Greenwald, the lawyer-turned-journalist-turned-global headline for his reporting on leaked NSA documents, says there is about to be a revolution that will radically change how news organizations cover governments and other big institutions. The change, he insists, is inevitable because of the pervasiveness of digital content, which has already remade the global economy by allowing instant access to vast troves of information. “Government and businesses cannot function without enormous amounts of data, and many people have to have access to that data,” Greenwald says, adding that it only takes one person with access and an assaulted conscience to leak, no matter what controls are in place. . . ."

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Wikipedia, Quality Assurance, Editors Delete 250 Accounts

Quality Requires Curation --

Wikipedia editors, locked in battle with PR firm, delete 250 accounts | Ars Technica: " . . . .Wikipedia editor Kevin Gorman in an interview with Vice. "They're immediately obvious to the casual user as lame spam. I'm much more worried about what happens when an unethical outfit manages to start getting major clients and start controlling articles that our average reader assumes are not written by corporate flaks.". . ."

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Yahoo! Hires Pogue, New Media Venture Mistake

Deja View: Fourth Time Lucky - Yahoo! Hires Gadget Guy Pogue For New Media Venture -SVW: "Investing in software engineers is far more profitable for Yahoo! because it knows how to scale their work across its entire platform. Star columnists can cost the equivalent of ten software engineers and their work is scaled across a dozen or so monthly web pages. However, every few years Yahoo! forgets that the economics of a media business (now, even more dismal) are too dismal to pursue, and yet another Yahoo! media venture bites the dust."

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Bloomberg News Curbs Articles That Might Anger China

Nothing like voluntary censorship --

Bloomberg News Is Said to Curb Articles That Might Anger China - NYTimes.com: ". . . In the call late last month, Mr. Winkler defended his decision, comparing it to the self-censorship by foreign news bureaus trying to preserve their ability to report inside Nazi-era Germany, according to Bloomberg employees familiar with the discussion. “He said, ‘If we run the story, we’ll be kicked out of China,’ ” one of the employees said. Less than a week later, a second article, about the children of senior Chinese officials employed by foreign banks, was also declared dead, employees said . . ."

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Jeremy Scahill on Media Venture with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras (video)

Jeremy Scahill on Media Venture with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras: "We Hit the Jackpot": "Jeremy Scahill talks in the clip about the new media venture with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras funded by eBay found Pierre Omidyar. Jeremy Scahill is National Security correspondent of "The Nation", author of "Dirty Wars. The World Is a Battlefield" and the New York Times best-selling book "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army", won the Georg Polk Award. The whole interview with Jeremy Scahill is going to be online at www.kontext-tv.de in English and German versions by October 18, 2013. Scahill talks about Europe's and Germany's role in the "dirty wars", the situation in Somalia and Syria, the Afghan war and the connection between NSA spying and covert kill operations around the world. Published on Oct 21, 2013

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New York Times Struggles

Old media death spiral --

New York Times Struggles to Replace Print Ads With Digital Sales - Bloomberg: "The New York Times Co.’s advertising department is struggling to replace its once-lucrative print ads with digital sales, as Google Inc. (GOOG) and Facebook Inc. gobble up increasingly large chunks of marketers’ budgets.
Both print and digital advertising at the newspaper decreased about 3 percent in the third quarter, the company said last month, signaling that the total amount fell below $140 million. That’s the lowest level since at least 1998, when the Times began reporting the ad revenue of its individual papers." (read more at link above)

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Newspaper Ad Spending, Drops Like Lead Balloon

Newspaper Ad Spending Continues To Drop - Business Insider: "The newspaper ad spending collapse has been monumental. After peaking in the early 2000s, print ads have dropped off a cliff, and "digital dimes" haven't replaced them. On an inflation-adjusted basis, newspaper print ad spending is now back to 1950s levels."

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New York Times, Confirmation Bias

NYT Discovers Confirmation Bias | The Big Picture: “Perhaps something more complicated than sketching out voting districts is at play. The polarized political map is now accompanied by a media ecosystem that is equally gerrymandered into districts of self-reinforcing discourse.”

From the better-late-than-never files:

I want to direct your attention to an article from David Carr, titled It’s Not Just Political Districts. Our News Is Gerrymandered, Too. That’s where the above quote came from.

The bad news is that we learn that the media reporter for one of the more important American newspapers is only now discovering both confirmation bias and the Balkanization of the press. The good news? Well, let’s consider this a form of progress.

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