Category / Journalism

by Edward Champion

Agism Going Down at the Dailies

There’s two extraordinary stories from Romenensko. The first deals with political commentator Jim Witcover, who at 78, had his column at the Baltimore Sun reduced his frequency, with the sun cutting his salary down to a third of its previous rate. When the year on the contract renewed, the Baltimore Sun then sent a termination notice by overnight mail. Could it have been Witcover’s anti-Iraq stance or the fact that he was older?

The second item concerns this memo from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which offers a retirement package to those “who are 50 ages and above as of November 1, 2005.”

With both of these stories, there seems to be a clear and resounding message here. If you’re a journalist, even a syndicated columnist, getting up in years, don’t expect to be respected. Don’t even expect to be treated with any polite exit procedure. With newspapers already facing possible threats from major advertisers looking for a “younger, lowbrow” demographic, rather than an “older and elitist one,” could it be that newspapers are panicking and taking this attitude too much to heart?

[UPDATE: The Baltimore-based Live by the Foma offers his perspective on Witcover’s career and how it ties into the Baltimore Sun‘s legacy.]

by Edward Champion

Bill Keller: Chickenhead of the Month

It’s been a while since we awarded anyone the Chickenhead of the Month. We like to reserve this special prize for a person making truly astounding leaps in logic.

Lo and behold! While we may be on hiatus from the Brownie Watch, we opened the NYTBR‘s pages yesterday and found a fantastic dollop of silliness from none other than Bill Keller himself!

In a letter, New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller responds to the Posner media essay that appeared a few weeks ago in the NYTBR. Keller has made a fantastic claim: namely, that the New York Times is in the business of providing something “more elevated and consequential.” If this is the case, how does this explain the continued ridiculousness of the Style Section? Or last week’s amazing devotion of Times resources to Bridget Jones? Or yesterday’s slipshod cover story in the Magazine, where an alternative source was served up by a bogus claim of “technological advances” and, as Mr. Birnbaum noted in the comments section, a wholesale refusal to reference Hubbert’s Peak?

If this is what Keller calls “more elevated and consequential,” then I shudder to think about what he considers conventional. What business does Keller have talking about a professional code when he has hordes of Times staffers devoting precious time and resources to distinguishing between a salwar kameez and a sari? How dare Keller pull this stunt within his own pages when, by his own admission a few months ago, his paper failed to cut the mustard in covering Iraq? When I think about professional code, I think of a a newspaper that dares to question anybody and anything — whether the Bush Administration or Hilary Clinton. It is not, as Keller suggests in his interpretation of Posner’s article, a matter of being either “liberal” or “supine,” but of being regularly active and constantly probing any and all subjects, where others would fall asleep at the wheel. That is, in a nutshell, journalism. And believe it or not, it is not nearly as partisan in the blogosphere as Keller would suggest.

Additionally, one wonders if Keller’s letter is a desperate ploy to give the NYTBR the illusion of intellectual debate. Despite a few brownie shipments sent to Mr. Tanenhaus and some successes, it has been clear to us that the Keller-Tanenhaus experiment has, for the most part, failed. Today’s NYTBR is more concerned with providing column inches to John Irving and Nora Roberts, giving odious reviewers like Leon Wieseltier and Joe Queenan more paychecks than they deserve, rather than reflecting culture and literature, much less providing an “elevated ” place to talk about it.

We suspect that the onus falls more on Keller than on Tanenhaus. We therefore grant Mr. Keller our “Chickenhead of the Month” award.

by Edward Champion

It’s the Statement, Stupid

This morning’s New York Times features some disingenuous reporting about the oil crisis from Peter Maass:

One of the industry’s most prominent consultants, Daniel Yergin, author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book about petroleum, dismisses the doomsday visions. ”This is not the first time that the world has ‘run out of oil,”’ he wrote in a recent Washington Post opinion essay. ”It’s more like the fifth. Cycles of shortage and surplus characterize the entire history of the oil industry.” Yergin says that a number of oil projects that are under construction will increase the supply by 20 percent in five years and that technological advances will increase the amount of oil that can be recovered from existing reservoirs. (Typically, with today’s technology, only about 40 percent of a reservoir’s oil can be pumped to the surface.)

As Paul Roberts argued in The End of Oil and James Howard Kunstler railed against with jaded fury in The Long Emergency, what technological advances? Where will these come from? What are they? Do we pull these out of the hat and get a crummy raffle prize?

I particularly like the way that Maass not only allows Yergin to get away with this criminally general statement (thus underplaying the oil crisis), but prefaces the statement with “one of the industry’s most prominent consultants” and “author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book,” failing to point out that Yergin never singled out any tech specifics in his article.

So what was the point of this ridiculousness? To provide “fair and balanced” journalism? To throw in a credentialed naysayer without actually calling up Yergin and ask him to elaborate on his views? That’s lazy journalism — the kind of misleading context that I expect from some priapic warblogger.

by Edward Champion

NYT = People-Style Profiles Can’t Be Too Far Away

LA Weekly reports on a development that may kill two mediums with one stone. Apparently, movie studios plan to kill their full-page advertising for the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. (At $100,000 per full-page ad, that adds up to a lot of dough.) The justification? The studios want to attract younger, lowbrow moviegoers and they view these two newspapers as “older and elitist.”

This is a fascinating development for several reasons: (1) This only confirms the notion that Hollywood is uninterested in making adult films (or at least appealing to adult audiences). (2) Studios have previously thrown so much money at publicity that their lavish spreads have seemed almost inconsequential. Is this a sign that they’re starting to tighten their belts? (3) That entities as slow-moving as movie studios recognize the declining readership of newspapers suggests that, at least on the entertainment front, we’re about to see a real transformation in entertainment journalism and related media. I sincerely hope that online outlets aren’t co-opted, along the lines of the corrupt Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

Of course, since this isn’t yet a fait accompli, expect to see Bill Keller promote more entertainment-oriented junk on the front page in a last-minute effort to woo back Hollywood.