That other scandal at News Corp.

Posted on October 25, 2011 | 1 Comment
 
 The really interesting question about the waning days of Rupert Murdoch’s reign over News Corp., his global media empire, is just how much irreparable harm his regime will do to the marquee institutions it controls that preceded him and deserve to survive.
 

So far, the redoubtable, 226-year-old Times of London is largely unscathed — though, sadly, it has become a tabloid — and, I suspect, civilization will manage without Britain’s News of the World, the century-and-a-half-old scandal sheet that Murdoch folded last summer amid continuing investigations that its reporters had been hacking into private voice mailboxes for years and their bosses had been lying about it.

Over here, nobody can blame Murdoch for ruining Fox News, since it’s thriving and, besides, it was he and his henchman Roger Ailes who created it, so it had no proud traditions they could disgrace.

Not so with The Wall Street Journal. When Murdoch bought its parent Dow Jones & Co. in 2007, overpaying scandalously, it was one of a small number of truly great newspapers — in its breadth, thoroughness, clarity, news judgment, the scope of its editorial imagination, its respectability.

Within the news world, The Journal’s shadow was long. It was admired and imitated. It pioneered styles of investigative reporting and narrative craft. People studied its front page to learn how to write and edit. I know I did.

Despite his reputation for swill and swagger, in 2007 it seemed plausible to assume that Murdoch understood his strategic success depended on keeping The Journal good. Whether he did is open to dispute. Some argue it’s a better paper, livelier, visually engaging, nimbler, less self-indulgent. Me, I don’t trust it the way I used to. I find its coverage of public policy now skews to the right, its stories are twitchy and impatient. I think the old Journal would have been much bolder in exposing the financial pigfest that shoved us into our current economic muddle.

But now it seems the more troubling concerns about the influence of News Corp. center less on The Journal’s news than its business practices. Earlier this month, the publisher of The Journal’s European edition and the head of Dow Jones for Europe, the Middle East and Africa was forced out amid astonishing allegations, Continue reading →

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A digital journalism revolution with strings attached

Posted on October 9, 2011 | 5 Comments

Bring more than a thousand journalists together, many of them young and most of them brimming with skill in handling today’s most dazzling information tools, and you’d expect feverish talk about producing the kind of reporting that moves nations. Apart from dropping names and looking for jobs, that’s what journalists do in their off-hours—they talk stories, they talk opportunities to do the kind of work that matters.

And that’s what I expected when I rejoined the Online News Association, the premier organization of digital journalists, and went to their recent annual conference in Boston.

Boston did have some of that, notably sessions on the Arab spring, on telling in-depth stories better, and on the largely overlooked history of racial and sexual diversity in the digital revolution—which was fomented, as it happens, by lots more minorities and women than the standard fable of white boys in the garage might suggest.

So the rising generation of journalists didn’t seem wholly indifferent to the needs of a world that the rest of us hope they’ll dedicate themselves to serving, if not saving. But the conference sessions that generated the most buzz, and which had people sitting in the aisles and clustered at the doorways, weren’t about rooting out corruption or feeding the hungry.

They were about entrepreneurial journalism, which isn’t some new catchphrase for street-smart, down and dirty reporting. It’s a term for turning news and comment into a perpetual hustle. They were about transforming yourself into a “brand,” a recognizable label that can be monetized, thanks to the online traffic successful brands draw via New Age social media. They were about “cooking up tasty apps,” which is tech-speak for clever new interactive feeds that slice the informational customer base in novel ways.

And throughout the conference was the hip, deft, never-heavy hand of the affable lords of the online world. On the panels, at the booths, on the podiums were representatives of Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, even Microsoft, which sponsored the first-night reception. They were welcomed as authoritative guides to the sophisticated, market-savvy journalism of today. They were envoys from colossal corporate enterprises, but they were embraced as ambassadors of a revolution—not because they know anything about news, but because they tend the meadows where the customers browse. Continue reading →

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On transparency: When coming clean isn’t clean enough

Posted on September 26, 2011 | 3 Comments

 

TechCrunch is a highly regarded news site that was founded in 2005 and won a reputation for scoops on Silicon Valley dealmaking. AOL bought it last year as one of several big moves by the onetime online powerhouse—moves that included acquiring Huffington Post and installing impresario Arianna Huffington as AOL editorial chief—to reinvent itself as a must-visit emporium of news and comment.

At the time of the deal, reportedly worth $30 million, AOL said it expected TechCrunch’s entrepreneurial founder, Michael Arrington, to stick around for at least three years. Then came word earlier this month that Arrington was starting a venture capital fund, which would sprinkle seed capital on tech startups. Called CrunchFund, it had among its early investors AOL itself, which put up $10 million of an initial $20 million in funding.

Here’s where it gets tacky. Although Arrington would step aside as TechCrunch managing editor, both he and the site would continue to cover projects that the fund would help bankroll.    

That is a notable departure, to say the least, from customary journalistic protocol, which demands that reporters steer wide of topics in which they have personal stakes. And so the fat hit the fire. After all, the potential wasn’t just pimping the Continue reading →

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Why search giant Google is buying Motorola

Posted on September 12, 2011 | 2 Comments

For all its claims to transparency, the world of Internet media is so layered with mystery that figuring out something as straightforward as a big corporate takeover, where strategies are usually clear, is like trying to break a code written in an obscure foreign language.

Case in point is the Google-Motorola deal. Google, the reigning online colossus, is buying Motorola Mobility, the legendary consumer electronics company that now makes mobile phones and TV set-top boxes.

At $12.5 billion, it’s a sizable purchase, even for a lushly cash-rich company like Google, which has $39 billion in its sock drawer.  It will double Google’s workforce. But what’s impressive isn’t the size of the deal. It’s the purpose behind it, which seems, at first glance, inscrutable.

Google, after all, makes its money from search. Mainly, it auctions off search words to corporate clients that want to advertise alongside the responses Google delivers to online queries related to things they peddle. It’s a sweet business. Google made $3 billion last quarter on revenue of $9 billion.

Motorola Mobility, on the other hand, sells handsets and is the No. 2 provider—after Cisco—of the set-top boxes that cable operators rent to subscribers to carry TV channels into their homes.

So, what does one thing have to do with the other? Why is an extravagantly successful service company, the darling of Internet users worldwide, buying into the hardware business, where competition is fierce and margins are low? Why does a search-based behemoth want to spend billions on cell phones and cable boxes?

There are several answers, which together provide a glimpse of the swirling changes in the new media economy, and some disquieting clues as to how some Continue reading →

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The post-9/11 decline of media independence

Posted on August 29, 2011 | 4 Comments

 

The 10 years since 9/11 have been a momentous time in media history, with explosive Internet growth, the emergence of online search as the chief rudder of public attention, the boom in social networks, mobile devices, and tablets, and, now, the birth of specialized apps for every imaginable slice of information and entertainment.

The velocity and richness of media inventiveness come, however, amid a paradox: The sharp decline of the news media institutionally. By that I mean the media not as information utilities, where they are still indispensable, but as entities with the will, the material base, and the intellectual courage to stand up to the powerful winds of manipulation and to speak independently in what they believe is the public interest.

This past decade, which is about to be commemorated exhaustively, has been bookended by the two most egregious instances of media failure in the half-century since Vietnam. Both have had historic consequence. The first, soon after the Twin Towers fell, was the media’s enlistment into the Bush administration campaign for public support for its invasion and occupation of Iraq and, more broadly, into its War on Terror.

The media’s complicity in that post-9/11 panic had many elements. Their endorsement—with some notable exceptions—of the administration’s lies about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was only the most flagrantly destructive.

More toxic, in the long run, was the continuing and largely unquestioning acceptance of a number of dubious and transformative propositions: That the country needs a permanent global network of forward bases and a colossal Continue reading →

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The media since 9/11: Living after the fall

Posted on August 26, 2011 | Leave a comment

This column, written to mark the 5th anniversary of 9/11, was originally published on Sept. 12, 2006.

Late in the afternoon of Sept. 12, 2001, I walked over to Times Square from my office in midtown Manhattan and joined a small crowd beside a New York Times delivery truck to buy a copy from the special run of the morning paper. It was an extraordinary document, that day’s Times, story after story, stunning photos, firsthand testimony by a great news organization at the top of its game to an unparalleled assault on its own hometown.

I bought it not to read, but to keep. And looking back at 9/11 and its significance to the life of this country’s media, it struck me that buying a newspaper to memorialize a day now seems archaic. People used to do that when they married or their kids were born. It’s a custom that rested, in part, on the belief in a nexus joining key moments in our private lives to the sweep of history in which our lives are embedded. That belief still seems reasonable.

But it also rested on the belief that the newspaper was a trustworthy chronicle of that wider history. And with five years now separating us from the searing events of 9/11, among the changes in the world of media since the Twin Towers fell the collapse of that belief is among the biggest.

It’s not the only change. The cascade of fractiousness, distrust, loathing and mean-spiritedness that the media endure, indulge in, and in some cases profit from, is a post-9/11 reality. The economic and technological tumult in media Continue reading →

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New wave of local journalists sweat old rights and wrongs

Posted on August 15, 2011 | Leave a comment

The world of online journalism often gets a bad rap from traditionalists, who fear for the soul of the profession, wherever that may be. Web-only news sites are the places where unlicensed drivers get behind the wheel, rumors are news, and clandestine videos, shrewdly edited to embarrass, are posted as if they’re documentary records.

The new wave practitioners are criticized as hasty and reckless, slaves to mob sentiment and their funders’ wishes. They’re too impatient to verify, and have only the vaguest commitment to public service. If traditional ethics has been a tragedy, contemporary ethics is a farce.

That, at least, has been the rap among some of us, and since I’ve done my share of finger-wagging I was eager to see a timely report from American University’s new media incubator, J-Lab, subtitled “Navigating the New Ethics of Local Journalism.” It’s about what this new generation thinks about professional rights and wrongs, and it’s based on lengthy interviews with 17 top players whose local Continue reading →

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