From the AP:

NASA: Money key to more space shuttle flights (AP)

This one is from, as usual, the AP.

Australian study uses cat food in war on cane toad

Stunning.

Every now and then, the White House asks a news agency with a scoop to hold the story. Sometimes it’s for legitimate reasons, other times it’s for CYA reasons. Most famously was back in 2006 when the New York Times had the scoop on the wire tapping story and the Bush administration pressured the newspaper to sit on it. Which, of course, the NYT did not. Last week, the Pakistanis captured top Taliban commander Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. Because the US felt that other Taliban leaders were unaware of the capture at the time, they wanted the paper to hold on the story to prevent other people of interest from heading deeper into hiding. The NYT complied and, in an interview with the BBC, Bill Keller, executive editor of the paper, explained the decision.

Generally, it goes against journalism ethics to withhold a story (and it’s almost always bad juju to bury a story completely). It’s interesting to hear about what certain news organisations  consider to be compelling cases and how they make those judgments.

A very interesting read. Definitely worth checking out.

New York Times Chief Explains Baradar News Delay

This sentence is the best lede sentence I’ve read in quite some time (from the AP):

VANCOUVER, British Columbia – The XXI Olympic Winter Gamesbegin Friday, and that’s about the only thing certain about them.

At first I thought I was reading an Onion headline: ‘Phone texting reveals sensitive new “metrotextual”.’ But, alas, this comes from Reuters, so it can’t be a joke. The article says that men have become quite comfortable texting other men with “x’s” (which is a shorthand for ‘kiss’) as a sign-off. According to the article and a T-Mobile research study, “nearly a quarter of men (22 percent) regularly include a kiss on texts to their male mates.” I call BS, or not. Who knows, it may be true. But then it goes on to claim that 1 in 10 men over the age of 55 also do the same. For reals? Seems fishy to me. A clinical psychologist, Ron Bracey, was quoted in the article as saying, “the advent of mobile phones and social media means more communication is done non-verbally, and through this it seems men can more easily share their feelings with others — especially their male friends.”

So, let’s presume 25% of you guys are actually signing off with a bromantic “x” in SMS’s to you male pals. Is it because you’ve always wanted to share your dude love, but have only just now found a safe way to do it? Personally, I feel like the “x” is a fairly innocuous sign-off symbol and doesn’t have much deep meaning at all. Hell, I’m not sure the symbol has ever signified anything more than a bit of whimsical flirtation at best. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against the symbol – in fact I appreciate it. To me, the “x’s” and the “o’s” have always been a friendly coda, the norm in the Internet age when tapping out “sincerely”, “love”, or “with kindest regards” on our keyboards or thumb-pads has gotten too laborious or unnecessary. And that’s not meant contemptuously, it just is what it is – a norm.

What gets me, though, is the odd progression of this metrosexual/metrotextual meme. Poor actual homosexuals are now left with a comical linguistic association with men who put too much gel in their hair, wear argyle and send cellular love around the world with “x’s”. That seems a bit unfair, trivial and trite.  Maybe we should instead call these men enthusiastic-dressers and x-texters respectively, and drop these plays on words respectfully.

Or am I just being a grumpy old man?

xoxo
Elliott

Today’s a sad day in the world of print journalism. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has decided to stop printing and switch to an online-only format. The newsroom’s staff will shrink to about 20 people and the paper will focus more on commentary and opinion than investigative news. The New York Times has a great article about the closure here.

The Oregon Daily Emerald, the University of Oregon’s student Daily and my beloved former employer, is making some headlines today. The news staff is on strike over a conflict with the paper’s Board of Directors regarding the Board’s hiring process for a publisher (a new position) and the changes to editorial independence that would occur as a result of the hire. In short, the news staff felt the Board’s decision would have created several unnacceptable conficts of interest and will not publish until the Board meets four demands to resolve those conflicts.

The news staff are publishing updates at independentjournalism.wordpress.com and have linked to several news outlets that have picked up the story, one of which is Gawker, a media news and gossip blog. Here’s some of the fun news – Gawker’s story graphic is the front page I designed with my managing editor, Steven Neuman, back in 2004. To think one of my favorite front pages as a designer on the ODE staff has been resurrected for this momentous event in the paper’s history is kind of bizarre and nice, quite frankly. Now, I suppose that the editors at Gawker just did a Google image search on “Oregon Daily Emerald”, and that’s where they got the cover for their graphic. But, I have a hunch they’ve been hanging onto that front page for years now just waiting for the perfect moment to use it.

[Read more]

A particularly interesting article on NYT.com today describes one of the most bizarre media buys I’ve ever heard about. In Google’s relentless (and arguably noble/criminal/insane) efforts to digitize every book that ever was, the search giant found itself running up against the law. Copyright holders settled a class-action lawsuit with Google over the digitizing and online publishing of protected materials, and as part of the settlement Google will charge customers for the materials and pay the copyright holders a percentage. Seems like a fair deal.

However, this is where it gets interesting. The reached agreement, still subject to court approval, says that Google must make “reasonable and practicable” efforts to find the authors of the works in question to allow them to opt-out of the digitizing process. Because it’s an opt-out system, and because the world of books is, well, huge, it has meant Google has to make a proportionally huge effort to find these people. The Internet itself doesn’t even hold the names and contacts of all the authors of the world’s obscure titles. As such, Google is spending $7million on legal-notice ads in newspapers around the world. 

[Read more]

Ok, what follows is perhaps one of the best news quotes ever. Bobby Jindal singled out $140million in the stimulus package appropriated for volcano research as an example of unnecesary spending. Of course, Portlanders and Vancouverites living within the footprint of Mt. St. Helens might disagree. The following is from the cnn.com article on the matter:

“Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington,” Jindal said.

But Marianne Guffanti, a volcano researcher at the U.S. Geological Survey, said, “We don’t throw the money down the crater of the volcano and watch it burn up.”

And that, my friends, is a badass response. Right on Marianne!

Well, today’s a bit of a sad day. As the recession spreads, the impacts reach further. It’s no mystery that traditional media have all but completely lost their ability to generate revenue and stay afloat in today’s day and age. And NPR is not immune – their funding comes directly from personal contributions, endowments, and corporate underwriting, and there’s just not as much giving going on. So, NPR is having to lay off 64 staff members, half of which are reporters (according to Pam’s House Blend), and shut down News & Notes and Day to Day.

News & Notes, anchored by Farai Chideya, is NPR’s only black issues program and I’ve been quite fond of the show’s innovative approach to every news story. In particular, their weekly Blogger Round-table has always been an exciting and lively opinions section that has been really fun to listen to. I don’t know what’s going to happen in an NPR world with no specific programming block for black issues, and I sincerely hope that the network will find some way to address that.

The other show that will be going off the air is Day to Day. I remember when the program came on. It was fantastic to have a mid-day news program that was lighter and, perhaps, more offbeat than the more traditional Morning Edition and All Things Considered. And, I always got the feeling that it was more west-coast centric (it is produced in California, after all).  

Both shows will continue broadcasting until March, and I’ll keep listening until then. Alas, given my borderline obsessive passion for NPR, you can imagine I’m pretty bummed.