Final P-I grace notes

I'm still making my way through Tuesday's final print edition of the Seattle P-I, and there's some great fine-print stuff hidden in there among the big-headline commemorative features I highlighted last week.

Buried on Page A32 with the rest of the obits -- between "PETERSON: Susan A." and "RASKOV: Marcia C." -- is this two-line listing under "King County Deaths": "POST-INTELLIGENCER: Seattle, 146, of Seattle, March 17.

And then my favorite, in the Sports section's agate-type transactions column -- where, for example, you might normally learn which spring-training baseball players were cut from their major-league rosters -- the Monday transactions include "Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sports Department." Listed there are the "released" sports editor Nick Rousso, who joined us for Friday's M&M poker game, and baseball reporter David Andriessen who, in the jargon of the form, is said to be "placed on irrevocable waivers for the purposes of granting him his unconditional release."

Everyone in the sports department is given a similar send-off. Funny, sad, classic gallows-humor stuff.

The best transaction report, though, is the final entry, which doubles as a parting shot at the new, skeleton-crew online P-I:

"Optioned Gerald Spratt (night editor) and Greg Johns (reporter) to their minor-league camp."

Spratt and Johns are staying on at SeattlePI.com.

Jefferson, improvised

Now that I have received permission from Flickr user little.brain (Paul Fankhauser, until this week a P-I tech expert), here is the photo I mentioned yesterday of Thomas Jefferson's famous quote about newspapers. The quote, painted in a P-I newsroom stairway, was modified by a commenter apparently unhappy with the paper's online future.

By the way, there was some speculation online that this is a Photoshopped picture, with the snarky amendment to Jefferson added digitally. Paul assures me the sign was real, that it was still taped to the wall late Monday night but was gone when he arrived at work on Tuesday.

The P-I, going and coming

From my old office at the Seattle P-I you could see the reflection of our iconic P-I Globe overhead in the windows of a building across the courtyard. We used to joke about checking to make sure the world was still turning, figuring that’s how we’d find out if they decided to shut the paper down.

Now that the print version of the P-I really has closed, it’s meager comfort I suppose that the red neon “It’s in the P-I” still spins around the neon globe. Coverage of today’s final edition was at once mournful and celebratory, appropriately, with highlights being Carol Smith’s excellent obit of the paper and Lewis Kamb’s fine “tick-tock” accounting of the final day in the newsroom, along with Curt Milton’s terrific video capturing staffers’ final thoughts, and a couple of nice photo galleries at both the P-I and Seattle Times sites.



Last night Michelle and I went to the paper’s unofficial bar in lower Queen Anne, Buckley’s, for a fun, drunken wake that was primed by loose change in the newsroom’s “Flower Fund” and replenished for hours, incredibly, by people around the country who heard about the party on Facebook or Twitter and phoned donations directly to the bartender. A couple hundred dollars worth, I heard.

Newspapers may die, the economy may tank, but generosity abounds ... or at least appreciation of a good excuse to throw a few back.

There was an undercurrent of tension at Buckley’s last night as, I understand, there has been at the P-I these past couple of weeks. Not just the bad feelings about the paper’s demise, I mean, but mixed feelings about its future. The P-I is not going away completely. As widely reported -- even in the lead spot on the New York Times site last night -- a small, online-only operation will survive, led by Michelle. That’s good for us personally (it’s nice to have one income between us) and for the couple dozen people who will join her in the new venture. I also believe it’s good for journalism. As newspapers struggle to stay afloat and new news models pop up, all eyes will be on SeattlePI.com to see if it can figure out how to commit journalism and make money at the same time.

But there’s a palpable backwash of resentment too among those 150 or so P-I journalists not staying on board for the next phase. Some of the online staffers, already suffering survivor’s guilt, told me they’ve been guilt-tripped further by former colleagues for accepting less pay to remain with the new venture while others were passed over. “I got the full ‘Norma Rae’ treatment,” one said.

A friend of ours, political reporter Angela Galloway, was quoted this morning describing the feeling last week when online execs trolled through the newsroom asking to speak to certain staffers about joining the new crew.

"Waiting for them to come out and pull in their latest hire was like sitting through a game of Duck, Duck, Goose," Angela said.

I saw a photo online this morning that also suggested some doubts about an online-only model: Thomas Jefferson’s famous quote about newspapers, as painted on a P-I newsroom wall, with a little jab at the new model tacked on.

"Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter," Jefferson said. Added, on printer paper: "Or at least on online version with a greatly reduced staff and lots of links."

Isolated misgivings notwithstanding, I think most of the old P-I gang wishes the new venture well. Even some who are talking about starting a news site of their own -- which they initially viewed as competition for the P-I -- are now coming around to the smart (I think) realization that two (or more) sites could complement and help one another.

Meanwhile, it’s been kind of fun for me to watch Michelle become an online news rock star. She was all over the Internet yesterday and in publications from The Stranger to the New York Times. One Twitterer, relaying a link to her description of the new online P-I, referred to “Nicolosi’s St. Crispin’s Day speech.” As a fan of Henry V -- the play, not necessarily the king -- I thought that was cool.

I feel bad for all my friends at the P-I, and for the loss of the paper itself. I loved working there and made many enduring friendships. I’m forever indebted to the now former managing editor, David McCumber, who has become a good friend and who wrote this sweetly sentimental departing column, for taking a chance and hiring me and Michelle five years ago, getting us back to Seattle from Los Angeles. He made a tremendous difference in my life.

Given the scrappy and positive outlook of my colleagues at the paper I have every confidence they’ll emerge from this sad day with exciting new professional or personal ventures.

There’s a lot of good will in this town just waiting for them. Last night, after the Buckley’s fest, I dropped Michelle off at the P-I to pick up her car. We were accosted at the garage by a middle-aged couple who said they just stopped by -- this was 11 o’clock -- to pay their respects.

They left this little shrine to the P-I.




Here are a couple more links from today's coverage:

Seattle P-I through the years (Seattle Times photo gallery)
Vintage covers from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (Seattle Times photo gallery)
Under the Needle: P-I had a cast of characters, with storied histories, by Mike Lewis
Last day at the P-I (P-I gallery)

Photo credit: Spinning globe, top, by Flickr user Helpcraft
Franny and Gina from another era, 2005, in my P-I office.

The premiere of Greg In Hollywood

Of all the thousands of journalists to lose their jobs lately, few can be luckier than our friend Greg Hernandez. Offering to help -- and meaning it! -- was an incredible posse of talented friends: one of the world's leading Internet search experts, a brilliant web designer, an expert web engineer and a marketing guru.

The result: A week after losing his job at the Los Angeles Daily News, Greg today launched his new venture, Greg In Hollywood, a site that has the feel of an instant winner.

Greg and Michelle are close friends so I'll let her tell more about his story and their common friends who helped launch GIH, but the site's only been up a few hours and I wanted to post a quick shout-out.

Good luck, Greg. I'm sure you'll rock in the new gig. I wish you equal measures of success and fun.

No news, which is bad news

This is one of a series of posts by Chuck Taylor and me about the decline of the newspaper business and what that means for Seattle journalism. Chuck last posted at his Seattle Post-Times blog, and I wrote previously here.

While I admire the hard work and can-do sense of optimism that have gone into events like Thursday night’s “No News Is Bad News” panel, the recent spate of discussions on Seattle’s journalism future have left me frustrated, and a bit winded.

For all the motion I don’t sense much movement. The conversations, though pinging among smart, involved people, tend to be circular -- and repetitive from event to event. Yes, it’s a drag that newspapers are dying; and yes, it’s important for society to save, replicate or replace the vital reporting function that metro dailies have provided lo these many years.

But listening in the other night to a live-stream of the NNBN event (video here) I found myself wishing we could stipulate those and a few other points:

* Newspapers have brought some of this shit on themselves, through arrogance, laziness, fear of technology and collective head-in-sand disease.

* “Newspapers” do not equal "news"; nor for that matter does “mainstream media” equal “journalism.”

* Bloggers are people too. Blogging is a platform, not a (lacking) style of reporting or writing.

* That said, not all bloggers or citizen journalists practice the kind of fact-checking that distinguishes the best of legacy professional journalism.

* Whatever comes next, a viable business model is key.

OK. So now what do you want to talk about?

For a few minutes the other night the discussion did swing around toward business models for news outlets -- panelist Art Thiel’s pitch for a Green Bay Packers-style community ownership plan, for example. Somebody else ignored an official admonition and uttered the word micropayments. But none of that talk got too far, nor was there much exploration of what readers actually want to see in their newsiness publication, whatever form it may take.

At one point I tried to interject via Twitter. “Question for #nnbn: Moving on, what will/should local newscape look like post-PI, or post-newspaper?” And I was pleasantly surprised that emcee Dave Ross picked up my question and repeated it to the panel. Alas it didn’t really go anywhere.

Now, I understand, the NNBN folks are talking about putting together a second event to continue the discussion, this one focused more on business considerations. That may prove helpful, but -- I’m sorry -- I’m dubious. And Chuck, I see that you’ve launched a nifty wiki to take on some of the same questions. That strikes me as a cool tool, essentially an extension of the public-meeting discussions, but from the comfort of our homes and with no closing gavel. Personally I’ve never felt comfortable contributing to wikis, but I like the concept and I’m sure some good thinking will surface there. I’ll be watching for sure.

Like the old-school, curmudgeonly dinosaurs lamented in these recent panels, I find myself naysaying a lot of stuff without offering any genius ideas of my own. One difference, maybe: I welcome the new. In fact I launched my own online news digest site 10 years ago, worked for MSNBC.com at startup three years before that, and have been a big advocate for Web-first, blog-centric and Twitterific reporting ever since.

But where does all that leave us? I still worry that whatever emerges from the ashes of dailies like the P-I will need some time to get its act completely together.

For instance, as much as I read and admire West Seattle Blog -- Tracy Record’s work ethic shames nearly every newspaper reporter I’ve ever known -- I got in WSB's virtual face a couple of weeks ago regarding a crime report that I thought was irresponsible in its description of a suspect. As much as I respect Cory Bergman, of MyBallard fame, I disagree with his premise -- noted in a comment on your recent post, Chuck, -- that what’s needed is a breach of the “Great Wall” between journalism and the business side of news operations. Actually, disagree is the wrong word. I’m not even sure what he means. But I know I believe in that wall.

This week, Eli Sanders at The Stranger speculated a bit about what the next, online-only P-I might look like: a lot of aggregation, he supposed, including links to formerly competing publications including the Seattle Times. That seems logical and even smart to me, although I know there’s a lot of angst about it among soon-to-be-former P-I staffers.

What do you think, Chuck? And what’s your take on the emerging news sites taking off around town -- PubliCola, Seattle Courant and the various neighborhood blogs? I have some thoughts on those, but I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts, and those of our readers, first.

News news, news talk

With the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on the brink of folding and several local groups meeting to discuss the future of news in Seattle, Chuck Taylor and I are joining the fray here and at Chuck's site Seattle Post-Times.

Periodically -- we haven't set deadlines or a time frame for this series -- we'll both post on both blogs our thoughts about the city's changing newscape and about the discussion tracking it. Chuck and I are friends, longtime former colleagues at the Seattle Times and parallel but unconnected travelers in the world of online news. We're also simultaneously (temporarily?) unemployed journalists.

Although there's nothing new about blogged conversations, this format is new for both M&M and Seattle Post-Times. Please feel free to join in with comments at either or both sites, and let us know how we could improve the format.

Thanks for joining us. -- Mark Matassa


Chuck,

Ever since Hearst announced last month that it would likely close the Seattle P-I in mid-March, Seattle journalists, bloggers and even public officials have been abuzz with concern and -- in some quarters, I suspect -- excitement: What if the Seattle Times closes too? We could go from a two-newspaper to a no-newspaper town inside of one year!

To buck each other up, rally the troops or maybe just find a shared room to stew in their shock and sadness, several groups have organized public forms on the future of the Seattle news business. There’s one tonight at the University of Washington, in fact, sponsored by the Online News Association, with a nice mix of panelists from print, online and radio.

Tomorrow night, Thursday, an ad hoc group of mostly bloggers is putting on an event titled “No News Is Bad News” at City Hall, promising to address the rather unfocused question “Seattle as a No-Newspaper Town?”

A couple of weeks ago City Councilman Nick Licata convened a hearing on the same subject, with some of the same folks involved. You not only attended that one, Chuck, but covered it live on Twitter and later posted about it on your Seattle Post-Times blog. Last week was yet another forum, this one by CityClub.

All well and good. And this subject of the changing news landscape has gripped the national media and blogosphere as well. The discussion as I’ve been following it seems to break into a couple of branches: wailing and navel-gazing by old-school newspaper loyalists who complain about short-cutting bloggers and who bemoan their own companies’ failure to stave off death; righteous attacks on those head-in-the-sand “curmudgeons”; and sometimes hopeful, sometimes heated arguments about which financial models might or might not save the news biz.

So, as a means of kicking off our own conversation, let me ask you:

Will you be attending this week’s events? And does tomorrow’s group even have the title right? That is, assuming the P-I does in fact close (and even if the Times follows suit), will that constitute “no news”? If so, would that be bad news?

I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts.
Mark

Newspapers Win!

A funny thing happened on the way to newspapers' funeral: A bunch of news broke out, in the form of yesterday's historic election, and people decided they wanted a paper. Not just the paper's "content" -- usually available free on their websites -- but the actual, old-school newspaper.

My friend and former colleague James Grimaldi posted on his Facebook page this morning that he noticed a long line of people outside his Washington Post office waiting to buy a paper. Then he updated his post, with vintage Grimaldi salesmanship: "(I) just spoke w/ some of the hundreds waiting to buy a copy of today's paper and told them we would have happily delivered one to their home this a.m."

The Post must have gotten the word. It soon announced it would print a special edition of today's paper -- an "Extra!" like in the old days. And a bunch of other papers followed suit: The Chicago Tribune, New York Times and LA Times were among those printing more copies, according to this Top of the Ticket report.

With a nod to this cool post (Google Reader-noted by both Michelle and Kaye) capturing last night's "historic home pages," I flipped through the Newseum's roundup of today's newspaper fronts. It's pretty cool to see all 714 of them in one spot.

Some trends emerge. A lot of straightforward "Obama wins" headlines, and more of the New York Times' simple and dramatic "Obama" heds than I would have expected. Also many versions of the "Change has come to America" speech snippet that both Seattle papers used, and quite a few of the reversed-out image scheme that the P-I employed.


I'm no designer, but one of the most arresting pages, I thought, was the full-page, sepia-toned "Mr. President" image of the Chicago Sun-Times.

And I got a kick out of the New York Daily News, which must not have gotten the memo. It stuck with its apparent mission: "Sports and crime, all the time."


(Great post on this subject over at VisualEditors.com. I just noticed it, thanks to Michelle's Reads.)

148 years of Times endorsements

At a time when many newspapers are debating whether they should make election endorsements, the New York Times not only presents its strong case for Barack Obama today, but also puts up a nifty online feature with every presidential endorsement going back to Lincoln's first, in 1860.

The page, "New York Times Endorsements Through the Ages," offers a timeline of those 38 elections, with color-coded squares indicating which party got the nod (and which was elected), a photo of the endorsed nominee, an excerpt from the endorsement and -- here's the real treat -- a link to the original editorial, usually in the .pdf format.

It's fun to look back and see where the Times was in sync with the electorate and where it wasn't -- no fan of Teddy Roosevelt, these guys.

Scanning through big batches of them you can see when the editors really believed in their pick (on Lincoln, "we shall have honesty and manliness instead of meanness and corruption in the Executive Branch"), and when, as with John Kerry in 2004, they were clearly holding their noses and making the best of a bad choice.

(The above photo, lifted from Wikipedia, is of John M. Palmer, the National Democratic Party nominee in 1896 whose candidacy wasn't helped by the Times endorsement. He lost to Republican William McKinley ... and Democrat William Jennings Bryan.)

Congrats, WSB!

Looks like Tracy Record of the awesome West Seattle Blog is about to be named one of Seattle's 25 most influential people.

Well deserved.

'I am a newspaperman'

"For some unexplainable reason, I am compelled to say that tonight."

That's how Steve Smith, my old Eugene reporting colleague and now editor of the Spokane Spokesman-Review, opened his elegiac blog post last night on the passing of the newspaper business as he and I once knew it. Some might find Steve's essay overly nostalgic or even treacly, but it struck me for its naked pining and undercurrent of frustration. I feel his pain. As Michelle and I talk about all the time around here -- too much, maybe -- how the hell do you rescue this stupid business?

Should Seattle-size papers turn into a collection of hyperlocal West Seattle Blogs? Can the LA Times be the LA Times without the half of its newsroom it has lopped off since I worked there? Do you really need a newspaper film critic when you've got The Cooler?

I found Steve's post while checking back to reread something I'd spotted on his "News is a Conversation" blog earlier this week, a report by the Spokesman-Review's "Task force for content evaluation," appointed by Steve. The report, available here, isn't particularly groundbreaking and I don't agree with all the conclusions -- "Have a dedicated Web re-write person" seems upside-down to me, for example -- but I like the discussion of priorities. It's a start, and something every newsroom should be doing if it hasn't already.

It's easy to get lost in all the industry's hand-wringing. Michelle's recent Google Reader pick, "Newspaper Stories We Tell Ourselves," by Ken Doctor, is a nice tour through the head-in-the-sand thinking that helped get us here. But it doesn't reach any brighter conclusions than Steve Smith's anxious newsroom committee.

Interestingly, while his "content evaluation" crew may have inadvertently spurred Steve's lament for old-time "newspapermen," his own paper is among those smartly bridging the new and old eras. The Spokesman-Review is a leader in newsroom transparency, for example, beginning with Steve's blog and including a daily look inside the paper's news meetings and other decisions. And it's still rockin' the house with some old-school shoeleather stuff like this week's investigative report naming the 10,000 people who bought counterfeit high school and college degrees from a Spokane diploma mill.

As a fellow dodo -- Steve's metaphor -- I read that and felt like I'm "still a newspaperman" too. Even if I'm really not one anymore.

'Wait. Are you the Michelle?'

When we walked up to the annual West Seattle SummerFest this afternoon, we stopped by the booth of the excellent West Seattle Blog to say hello and offer props. WSB really is an incredible blog. Michelle and I talk about it all the time as the model for a neighborhood news source and for the kind of community-centered, reader-friendly micro-coverage that might help save the stupid newspaper industry. So we were happy to meet Tracy Record, a lifetime journalist who runs the venture (more than) full-time, and her husband Patrick Sand, whom their site lists as co-publisher and "the sales guy."

Michelle stuck out her hand. "I'm Michelle," she said. "I run the P-I's web site."

"Wait," Tracy said. "Are you the Michelle? Like, from Michelle & Mark?"

I raised my hand, and we all had a nice few minutes of mutual admiration. We noticed long ago that Tracy had listed M&M on her West Seattle blog roll, but she must actually read it too. She asked about our road trip, and when she mentioned something that had happened in the hood recently she added, "I think you were still gone then."

Very cool. It also made me realize we haven't been doing much blogging lately. Sometimes, I find, you just feel like taking a break. We'll have a couple of little posts to catch up on in the next few days. For now, here are a couple more pics from today's street fair.

Saving the enemy

Well, OK, the Seattle Times isn't exactly my enemy, only the main competitor of my last paper, the P-I. And I'm not exactly saving it. But I did agree -- not foolishly, I hope -- to take part in an online discussion at Crosscut on the topic "How to turn around the Seattle Times."

Chuck Taylor, my friend and the editor of Crosscut, asked a large group of former Times reporters and editors to join him in the virtual roundtable following the news this week that the paper is cutting 200 jobs, including 30 layoffs in the newsroom.

Chuck began by laying out a somewhat radical view of what the Times should do, including giving away the paper for free at newsstands and raising the home subscription price "until it's cheaper for people to buy and own an iPhone." Then my old colleague Peter Lewis chimed in with a few ideas, and last night I added some thoughts too. So far, with the exception of a meager comment thread from readers, that's the extent of the discussion. You can read it here if you're interested.

I had some trepidation about offering what could be construed as advice to the Times, having last worked at the P-I and holding out some hope of returning there. (Not that the Times would listen anyway or, for that matter, that I came up with anything particularly novel.) Anyway, I hope my former bosses aren't offended.

Meanwhile, in clicking around this morning I ran across this funny cartoon by Rob Tornoe at a new site called PolitickerWA.com.


PolitickerWA, about a month old now, is part of a growing national network of "Politicker" sites. In fact, I read just yesterday about PolitickerCA at LAObserved, one of my favorite sites, and looked to see if there was a WA version. Sure enough. Its managing editor is James Pindell, whose bio lists political reporting, editing and blogging gigs at several web sites and papers including the Boston Globe.

So far the content is a bit thin but it looks promising. The more sources for this kind of information the better, and I wish this enterprise well.

(Cartoon used by permission)

And the Pulitzer goes to ...

Unlike the Oscars, there's no big buildup to the announcement of the Pulitzer Prizes for journalism, with lists of nominees and debates about the most deserving nominees. Not officially anyway.

Traditionally the prizes are awarded at a New York luncheon in the spring, about a month after the early April announcement of the winners but otherwise with no previous disclosure of which pieces or publications are in the running. For the past couple of decades, though, thanks to leaks from Pulitzer jurors, journalists around the country have had a pretty good idea of what has been nominated. That has allowed the familiar newsroom tableau of reporters and editors huddling around computer screens, hitting refresh on a list of wire stories until official word appears. Among other things, I expect such leaks allowed Michelle's bosses to have champagne at the ready when she won her Pulitzer back in the day.

This year's announcement of winners is tomorrow, but this time the buzz is significantly diminished. As Poynter Online describes in an interesting piece by Roy Harris, who has a new book about the Pulitzers, inside sources on the prizes are all drying up. For example, Editor & Publisher magazine has taken pride over the years in breaking the secret list of nominees, but this year, according to Harris, it has cracked only four of the 14 categories.

Dave Boardman, the Seattle Times editor who has been on the judging and receiving ends of the Pulitzer process, figures prominently in the Poynter story, and it turns out Boardman still harbors much bitterness about a 2002 Times investigation that was nominated for a prize but didn't win. That episode, in fact, is said to figure prominently in the clamming up of jurors.

Harris' piece is a good look inside this process.

The McCain-NYT affair

Was John McCain, the clean-government crusader, sleeping with an attractive blond lobbyist, 30 years younger than he, even while he ran for president as a reformer?

The newspaper world and blogosphere are still abuzz about yesterday's front-page New York Times story on McCain, particularly its implication that he had an affair in 2000 with a telecommunications lobbyist whose clients sought help from McCain's Senate committee. I saw the story yesterday but didn't read it until I noticed that my friend and old boss David McCumber blogged about his decision not to run the piece in the Seattle P-I. He wrote:

To me, the story had serious flaws. It did not convincingly make the case that McCain either had an affair with a lobbyist, or was improperly influenced by her. It used a raft of unnamed sources to assert that members of McCain's campaign staff -- not this campaign but his campaign eight years ago -- were concerned about the amount of time McCain was spending with the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman.

After reading his post and the story I'm not sure I agree with McCumber, but he certainly looks prescient. His reasoning -- remember this was Wednesday night when the story moved on the NYT wire but before the public had seen it -- perfectly matched the massive negative (and, at the Times, unexpected) reaction from many journalists and from readers across the political spectrum. Responses on McCumber's blog post overwhelmingly support his call. I'm guessing he feels very good about his decision. (Locally, the Seattle Times ran the piece on its front page, without explanation.)

My response to the story was different than David's. While I agree that the paper didn't "convincingly make the case" of an extramarital affair, I don't think that was its purpose. I read the story as one in a continuing, enlightening series of backgrounders on the candidates, all focusing on some event or conflict in their past that shaped their characters or candidacy. This one carried that "Long Run" series bug.

In this case, as I read the story, the point was the dichotomy between McCain's defining (and by all accounts) sincere crusade against special interests and his occasional blindness to his own ethical lapses, real or perceived. The lobbyist relationship was seen as a piece of this puzzle, though not a big "gotcha," as was a nicely summarized and relevant rehash of the whole Keating Five fiasco that nearly killed McCain's political career.

To my mind that's good solid political reporting, the kind I would aspire to. Interestingly, I was just listening to a Terry Gross interview the other day with Jacob Weisberg, the Slate editor and author of "The Bush Tragedy," whose key point was that journalists need to do a better job of exploring candidates' character, not just their positions, in a presidential race. You can hear that interview here.

A bigger concern for me, one that McCumber also cited, was the use of anonymous sources in the Times article. As reporters and editors who have worked with me know, I'm generally opposed to anonymous sourcing, especially in political reporting. It's too easy a crutch, both for the sources and the reporters, and I think it is slowly eroding our readers' trust in newspapers. But I also think, as Times Executive Editor Bill Keller noted, that there are times when anonymous sourcing is warranted. Handled correctly and reported exhaustively, these are often the stories that give readers important information they could not possible get otherwise.

My guidelines, honed over the years and reinforced by my four excellent editors at the LA Times, are these. To justify granting anonymity:

• The story must be of great significance
• It must not be reportable in any way other than using the unnamed sources
• The information must be confirmed by multiple independent sources or documents
  
• The sources must have a good reason to remain unnamed, such as real, demonstrable fear of financial loss or of physical danger
• The sources must be identified to the story's editors
  
• The sources' reasons for requesting anonymity must be stated plainly in the story, and the sources should be identified as fully as possible
  

These are difficult standards to meet. It's a close call, I think, whether this McCain story meets that importance threshold, but from what I've read of the paper's reporting efforts, the sourcing was solid and justifiably cloaked.

For its own purposes, and considering again that this story was one in the continuing "Long Run" series, I think the Times was right to run the story. That doesn't mean that the P-I or every other paper receiving the NYT wire should reach the same conclusion. Without the context of the ongoing series, the McCain story feels a bit more like a gotcha fallen short, and so I can appreciate McCumber's decision not to use it.

One of the best things to come out of this dust-up, I think, is the glmpse it offers behind the newsroom curtain and the increasing willingness it demonstrates of editors to engage with their readers. In addition to McCumber's smart blog post and the resulting reader comments, Keller and other top editors and reporters at the New York Times have been answering readers' questions about the story today, part of the paper's regular and enlightening online "Talk to the Newsroom" feature. It's very interesting. You can read that here.

Finally, there has been a lot of smart media criticism about the story online, on all sides of the question. I'll point you toward Jack Shafer's defense of the piece in Slate, which I thought was pretty good.

What did you think of the story? Did it even register? I'd like to know.

Angry Journalist Part Deux

I like this guy, but I can't tell whether to feel sorry for him or not. He keeps going back and forth:

"Angry Journalist #689:


I hate the fact that when I started as a reporter for a community newspaper 15 years ago I was paid $13,000 a year, and loved my job! I was part of the life of the community, running around covering city hall, the police, schools, natural disasters and anything else that struck my interest. It was local, but people actually gave a damn about what went in “their paper.” Now, I make $77,000 as a writer/editor for an industry trade publication, and I wonder what happened to me. I sit in a corporate office all day waiting for PR flacks to set up interviews with fat-cat executives who don’t give a damn about my publication. But then I read about the big dailies laying off hundreds of workers and I think, “heh, it could be worse.”"

Go Russ!

I noticed Kaye called out a quote today on the NiteNote from Russ Stanton's victory speech yesterday, when he was named editor of the Los Angeles Times. I'm not sure what drew her attention exactly -- I guess his description of the Times newsroom as an "endless 'Groundhog Day' nightmare." That might have struck some Timesers funny.

But it's true, what he was saying about the pattern there the past few years: a new editor being named, fighting valiantly (but unsuccessfully) against newsroom cuts and then quitting or being fired. Russ is fixing to change all that, and good luck to him, I say.

Michelle and I both worked with Russ -- she at the OC Register, me at the Times -- and liked him. Good guy, very steady, smart. I think Mich knows him too somehow, and Kate must.

I thought he made an excellent speech to the Times staff yesterday. Here it is, along with a story about the change.

If I'm reading this right ...

... M&M meets all the criteria to be a Washington Post blog.

Check out this interesting Post memo on blogging, courtesy of Washington City Paper.

SPI and Whatnot

Twenty-one years ago, back when I was freelancing for the entertainment and "going out" section at the Times-Picayune, I was amazed how little the people who ran the place seemed to know about what young people were doing, listening to, reading, thinking, and whatnot.

I told myself back then, "one of these days, I'm going to be in charge of one of these here entertainment sections, and it's going to have cool stuff in it. It won't be run by people who say things like 'Who is xxx? Do people listing to him/her? Should we write about that?' It'll be run by me, and I'll know all the answers."

Flash forward 21 years. Yesterday I launched an online-only, mostly entertainmant-y magazine covering the music/hanging-out scene in Seattle. I have an amazing crew of former mes -- read: interns -- who seem to know about every band in the city, which ones to cover, what's cool and what's not.

I know squat about the local music scene. My former creds as a former person who formerly was totally wired on the music scene in New Orleans is meaningless. I am her, the chick asking "Who is xxx. Do people listen to him/her?"

But I never ask "should we write about it?" Because I know that I don't know anything, and I have totally turned the magazine over to the amazing interns. Since they are the experts, (a no brainer here) they decide what to cover, they schedule, cover it, write about it and post it all as they see fit. All I do is edit it.

As it should be. What do I know, besides where the hyphens should go?

The setup feels good to me. I don't think the old people who work for newspapers need to know everything. They just need to know who does know everything, and that they should hand the reins over to them. Sometimes they don't want to do that. Me, I'm doing what I wished for back in the old days, 21 years ago: handing over the magazine to former me, the person who knows stuff.

Tonite, I met a bunch of new intern candidates at the launch party (as Mark mentioned, a gig a the Showbox, featuring a band called FLOATER). Awesome intern Rose (who had the hookup with the guy who put on the show at the Showbox, and arranged the whole launch party thing) invited a bunch of students to help us shoot the gig, and many of them were interested in signing up as interns. Things are looking good for the future of SPI.

At least, it feels that way, the night of this SPI launch party. Which I left early, telling Awesome Intern Rose, "I'm leaving now, because I'm old." The 21 year ago me would cringe at such wuss behavior. But 43 year old me says hey, hand me my cozy socks and a martini. It's Rose's turn, yo. She seems to know what she's doing. I'm happy to move aside and see what she makes. Go Interns, go!

No mercy rule

In a lot of Little League or rec-softball games there's a "mercy rule": Get ahead by 10 runs and they call the game. Stop embarrassing the other kids; let's go get a beer.

No such luck in the World Series, where it was already 11-1 in the fifth inning last night when I turned off the game with the Red Sox still batting and the Rockies still walking in runs. Final was 13-1. Will Leitch, a great sportswriter who keeps a good blog for the New York Times, Fair and Foul, is having none of it. The tuning out early part, that is. In fact, based on his own upbringing, he turns sticking out a baseball game into a moral imperative:

It’s my father’s signature maxim and has been the founding principle, perhaps the organizing tenet, of the Leitch family structure. It doesn’t matter how well things are going — or how much they’re falling apart — you always follow everything through to the end. If you’re succeeding, you can never let up until you are certain the job is done. If you’re failing (particularly when you’re failing in a dramatic, definitive fashion), you pay attention to what you’re doing wrong so it won’t happen again.

It's a good piece.

In other baseball coverage, I liked Rob Neyer's lineup for ESPN of the all-time best World Series players. As Neyer casts it, these aren't necessarily the best players ever (though some are), but his picks for the top performers in the history of the Series, by position. No shock that four Yankees make the list, but he's got a couple of nice surprise picks too, like Lou Brock in left field and Alan Trammell at short. Worth reading for baseball nuts.

Elsewhere, as long as we're showing no mercy let's turn to the news.

Today's the first day in a while that the LA fires haven't dominated the local newspapers -- more on the fires in a minute -- so I want to begin with the morning's big web-only news around these parts: the maiden voyage of Singapore Airlines' Airbus A380. That's a big deal here in Seattle because the A380 is the world's largest jetliner, it's made by the local Boeing Company's sole competitor and it beat Boeing's now-delayed new 787 Dreamliner jumbo-jet to market.

OK. What draws my attention is the P-I's decision to send its aerospace reporter James Wallace on a junket to cover this kickoff flight. As Wallace notes, he was part of a select group of media folks invited to join the "historic flight," with most of the rest of the passengers bidding online for tickets and one rich nerd reportedly paying $100,000.

(AP photo, from seattlepi.com)

To me this is a borderline ethical issue that warrants discussion and would benefit from a comprehensive journalism ethics policy, which I know firsthand the paper doesn't have. The problem, in general terms, is that when reporters take something of value from a source or potential source their integrity is compromised. At the very least, the appearance of conflict would be raised. Although reporters are trained to strive for objectivity (and most I've worked with are stand-up, good people) they're also human; it's easy to imagine the tone of a story being swayed, if only subconsciously, by cool gifts. That's why fashion reporters aren't wearing free Armani and even small-town City Hall reporters pay their own way at lunch.

So back to Wallace. I don't think he's in Airbus' pocket -- far from it -- and at this point in his very long career he's not on the make for a free flight between Singapore and Sydney, even on a luxury airliner. But does the reader know that? Check out this excerpt from James' blog entry on the flight:

I thought I would be sitting in economy class with the other 70 or so media representatives -- only a handful from the U.S. But a few of us, including my pal Geoff Thomas of ATW, were upgraded to business class and I was seated next to the chief executive of Singapore Airlines. We had some interesting talks on the plane about the future of the 747 as well as what's happening with the 787.

Not only special consideration but special access to the top source too! Even knowing James personally -- as well as his fine and exceptionally ethical editor, Margaret Santjer, whom I hired for the gig -- I momentarily lost control of my eyebrow.

All of which is not to say, though, that this trip would be a slam-dunk "no" for me as a newsroom manager. I've nixed several similar junkets but also let some through, including by Wallace. The reason I described this initially as a "borderline" ethics call is that good papers with good ethics policies leave some discretion for cases when news considerations outweigh concern about accepting some "gift," especially if the gift is something routine or not of great value. That's why, for example, sports reporters don't buy a ticket to sit in the press box -- they're there only to report the game, not as a spectator -- and why film critics normally watch free preview screenings of the movies they review.

In this case, there's certainly great news value, especially for the P-I's readership. And while the gift was of significant value, the courtesy invite was likely the only way to participate. I don't see Margaret on eBay with a hundred grand transferred into her PayPal account. On the other hand, there are subtle hidden gifts in a deal like this that go beyond the paper. What if Wallace decides he wants to write a book about the jumbo-jet competition? Surely this trip would be a big reporting and selling advantage. Should the paper be abetting that?

I don't know. After talking it all through I might have been persuaded to let James go. And maybe they did have such conversations; if so, good for them.

But here's what really gets me (and I'm sorry for the very long digression): After all that, the P-I's first stories about the flight, both last night and this morning, were by the Associated Press, the exact same accounts that appeared in the Seattle Times!

The best Wallace could manage, at 5:28 a.m. local time, was this blog entry: "I'll be filing my story of the first commercial A380 flight in a while. It was an incredible adventure."

He has since filed a full story, and it's fine, I guess. Still. What a waste of a good ethical dilemma.

For coverage (on another beat) that inspires total trust despite tricky ethical considerations, watch David Pogue's column in the New York Times Circuits section, which is always my favorite part of the Thursday papers. Today Pogue reviews Apple's new Leopard operating system, which drops tomorrow.

In Southern California, the fires are still burning and still devastating, of course, but it looks like they're turning the corner. The Santa Ana winds are subsiding and the temperature is dropping, so that will help. I like how the LA Times/Google map, which we embedded in a previous post, updates automatically and shows the progress in one glance.


View Larger Map

The Times, which has done such a spectacular job reporting the fires, turns attention today to the claims, including in its own pages, that the disaster has displaced a million people. Probably a bogus number, we now learn. Excellent reporting, including by a couple of friends and former colleagues, Sharon Bernstein and Megan Garvey. They rock.

Old News Dept.: Gene Stout finally got around to posting his Neil Young review -- "a stirring, entertaining journey" -- at about 5:15 last night, almost 24 hours after the concert began. M&M review here.

OK, with all that serious stuff out of the way, a parting mention of the feature that will probably generate more traffic than all those other boring stories combined: the P-I's photo gallery of the Fredericks of Hollywood fashion show.

Mercy!

(AP photo, from seattlepi.com)

Maybe smoke was in everyone's eyes

Turning first to the entertainment coverage on a morning when I find a lot in the papers that could be better:

I saw the Seattle Times' venerable rock critic Patrick McDonald at last night's Neil Young concert, hunched at intermission over a laptop with a Verizon wireless card. Good for Patrick, I thought. Next-day coverage, maybe even same-night coverage of a live event! I almost stopped and said hey, but he looked like he was on deadline and I didn't want to interrupt. I needn't have worried, apparently.

No sign of the concert in either local paper or on their web sites this morning. Deep in the Times' site, on the Entertainment page, a purple-shaded box with the photos of two editors offered their "Get Out" recommendation: Neil Young. But when I clicked I got some kind of this-file-is-empty error message. Lame. The recommendation has since been changed to "Spamalot."

I don't get how the papers could punt this. Even if I found the concert a bit disappointing it's a big deal, with a lot of expensive tickets sold, three generations of fans, a brand-new CD being pitched and almost an entire tour left to come. It's news. Sporting events are covered live every day of the year. Come on, man, even M&M was able to post a review by midnight last night.

Update: As of midday the Times has posted McDonald's review -- "a great, unforgettable, powerful show ..." -- and the P-I has posted a nice photo gallery, but still no review.

Moving on: The big news all over the Internet again today is the still-raging SoCal fires. The cool LA Times Google fire maps, first pointed out around these parts by Kaye's great NiteNote blog, have spread like, well, you know. The Seattle Times and P-I have been linking to the LAT map off their front pages, and now I notice the New York Times has gotten into the act with its own, staff-produced, non-Google multimedia map. Pretty good, but no better than the much quicker and totally intuitive Google version.

Although Long Beach hasn't been hit directly by the fires -- Kaye's been keeping us updated -- the LA Times has a good piece today about how topography funnels the smoke right into our old hometown.

The P-I "localizes" the fires with a front-page feature about some evacuating Californians who ended up here in Seattle. It's funny, when people first started leaving their homes down there I thought of the running gag in this year's "Curb Your Enthusiasm" show on HBO, in which a black Katrina-victim family comes to LA to live with Larry David and Cheryl. Maybe next year, I thought, the smoked-out Davids could pack up and head to New Orleans. When they get off the plane some bored-looking couple could say, Oh, you're Jewish! (You'd have to have seen the show for this to make sense, and don't worry, it really wasn't funny the first time around either.)

Other than the fires, which dominate both local front pages, it's one of those days when you could make an argument for two Seattle dailies. The P-I has one of its periodic cold-case murder stories (not my cup, but pretty well done) and a James Wallace takeout on the Airbus A380 superjet, of big interest to local Boeing-heads.

The Times has a good political profile of Richard Pope, a dumbass perennial loser candidate who unexpectedly -- probably even to him -- finds himself in the thick of a race this year because his opponent for the King County Council was caught driving drunk. Good take.

And David Postman, an FOM&M, has a sharp Postman on Politics post about how Republican Dino Rossi should frame his campaign for governor. The other day I complained that both papers were underplaying the news that Rossi would run again. But I also understood the editors' decisions; neither story had more than: He's running again. What they need, I thought, is a good second-day story (but on the first day) that explains why Rossi's decision is important and spins it forward. Postman, who is a good political reporter and must have had some brilliant direction somewhere along the way, gets that. His post still could be fleshed out a bit in story form and run in the paper, but it's a good start.

Paging down his blog, I notice he took a typically Postmanesque swipe at his bosses, complaining that his coverage of Hillary Clinton's Seattle visit was buried and providing a link to his own story. But it's followed immediately by this: "UPDATE: Apparently I wasn't paying attention and the story was on the homepage. Apologies to all. I hadn't had coffee yet." Sigh. As I've told my friend David a thousand times, Be cool, man.

Finally, in sports news, tonight is the beginning of the World Series. It looks like a decent matchup between the storied Boston Red Sox and the come-from-nowhere Colorado Rockies, this year's Cinderella story. But the LAT's terrific sports columnist Bill Plaschke isn't buying it.

Plaschke, who was from Seattle before moving to Los Angeles, minces no words in his take: "The Red Sox are a much better team from a far superior league. The Rockies are the Seattle Mariners with galoshes."

Ouch.

"So the most celebrated glass slipper in recent baseball history comes clacking to the World Series," Plaschke writes. "Good. The Boston Red Sox can use it to drink their champagne."

Bill's probably right. Still. I know where I'll be at 5 o'clock.