A Michigan legislator has introduced a bill that would authorize the state to issue licenses to journalists: Senator Bruce Patterson is introducing legislation that will regulate reporters much like the state does with hairdressers, auto mechanics and plumbers. Patterson, who also practices constitutional law, says that the general public is being overwhelmed by an increasing [...]

Politico continues its recent spate of articles attacking the journalistic practices of its competitors with a piece bemoaning the Washington Post‘s shift leftward, evidenced by the hiring of Ezra Klein, Dave Weigel, and other prominent left-of-center bloggers. The once-cautious Washington Post has begun to invest heavily in the liberal blogosphere, transforming its online presence — [...]

CNN, the company that invented 24/7 cable news but now finds itself fighting for relevancy, should abandon it’s “View From Nowhere” model of telling viewers what’s important, Jay Rosen argues. Rather than try to compete with Fox and MSNBC as an ideological-driven outfit, though, CNN should instead re-invent the genre. He even has a prime-time [...]

Since hiring Andrew Sullivan and a slew of other already-established bloggers a couple years back, the Atlantic Monthly website has gone through quite a few design changes.  But last week’s total reorganization of the site into a series of channels, subsuming all the blogs except Andrew’s into what amounts to collections of links to archives, [...]

NBC is the only network news program that’s not losing gobs of money, and that’s only because it has a 24/7 cable news outlet (MSNBC) to recoup its investment.   ABC and CBS are continuing to cut staff to pare costs but have no plan to actually make money, aside from hoping CNN will agree to [...]

Newsweek presents a devastating essay by Clifford Stoll explaining why this newfangled Internet thing is unlikely to catch on. After two decades online, I’m perplexed. It’s not that I haven’t had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I’ve met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I’m uneasy [...]

Remember that story about Frank Luntz giving up politics for Hollywood? In truth, though I passed it along last April after seeing it in The Wrap, I’d largely forgotten about it and didn’t think anything was unusual when I kept seeing Luntz show up as a political pollster. Jay Rosen?   Not so much.   He takes [...]

In a devastating takedown, Michael Kinsley argues that one reason print journalism is struggling is that its writing is “encrusted with conventions that don’t add to your understanding of the news” whereas we on the Web “get to the point.”  Among these are the inverted pyramid style, use of quotations that say nothing newsworthy, and [...]

Stephen Walt laments the hyper-specialization of the social sciences: One of the more unfortunate trends on contemporary social science has been a growing “cult of irrelevance,” a set of implicit standards that encourages smart young scholars to write more and more about less and less for fewer and fewer readers. The principle of academic freedom [...]

Marc Ambinder reports, “It’s not just Fox News that’s become subject of White House derision. The following is an excerpt from a joke e-mail that is circulating among White House staffers.” 7 narratives politico is fighting in their efforts to get an interview with the President 1.       They are more interested in readers than accuracy [...]

Newsweek‘s choice of cover art for its Sarah Palin issue has managed to generate controversy for three days now, finally prompting a response from the editors.  The salient passage: To note that choosing that particular photograph has ruffled a few feathers is perhaps an understatement. Palin denounced it—and us—to her million-strong Facebook following last night. [...]

Ezra Klein points out that, while journalists like to think of themselves as intrepid sleuths, the best of them are social networkers moreso than detectives. If you go back to Woodward and Bernstein, Woodward met Felt back when he was serving in the Navy, and the two men bonded over night law school and low-level [...]

A rather bizarre case in Illinois — even by the standards of that state. For more than a decade, classes of students at Northwestern University’s journalism school have been scrutinizing the work of prosecutors and the police. The investigations into old crimes, as part of the Medill Innocence Project, have helped lead to the release [...]

Tunku Varadarajan argues the New York Times has a moral obligation for getting two people killed by sending Stephen Farrell into a situation it knew was treacherous in order to get a scoop. Stephen Farrell was a British citizen reporting from Afghanistan. He’d received very strong advice from British troops to stay out of a [...]

Republican Bob McDonnell enjoys a rather sizable lead over Democrat Creigh Deeds in his race for Virginia’s governorship. But the Washington Post, which went after George Allen with amazing fervor in his 2006 race against longshot Jim Webb, is doing what it can to fix that. First, it ran a series of articles about a [...]

Rebecca Ruiz of the NYT Media Decoder blog wrote a post titled “NYTPicker Revealed. A Blogger With A Cause: Us,” revealing David Blum as the anonymous blogger behind NYTPicker, that got picked up on Memeorandum. It has disappeared.   Presumably,  this is because — as The Editors inform us in a subsequent post — the information [...]

Adam Serwer is incensed because he has “a lot of friends who spent a great deal of money, and went into a lot of debt, to learn how to be professional broadcast journalists” who are “now struggling to find work” and yet Jenna Bush Hager now has a job on Today despite having only a [...]

This morning, Jeff Jarvis passed along Peter Daou‘s tweet “CBS Early Show Prioritizes Jon & Kate Over Don Hewitt’s Death,” which linked this Consider This News video, itself prefaced “This speaks volumes about the state of TV news” My tweeted retort: “Old man dying yesterday not news?” Steven Taylor has some more detailed thoughts, notably [...]

Former Pentagon spokesman Ken Bacon has died.  He was only 64. Kenneth H. Bacon, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who became chief Pentagon spokesman under President Bill Clinton, died Saturday at age 64. Bacon had been battling melanoama, and was on leave was his job as president of Refugees International, a Washington-based group he [...]

Norm Geras (who just celebrated his 6th blogging anniversary) points us to this hilariously annoying SPIEGEL interview with Wired editor Chris Anderson: SPIEGEL: Mr. Anderson, let’s talk about the future of journalism. Anderson: This is going to be a very annoying interview. I don’t use the word journalism. SPIEGEL: Okay, how about newspapers? They are [...]

Walter Cronkite has passed: Walter Cronkite, the premier TV anchorman of the networks’ golden age who reported a tumultuous time with reassuring authority and came to be called “the most trusted man in America,” died Friday. He was 92. Cronkite’s longtime chief of staff, Marlene Adler, said Cronkite died at 7:42 p.m. at his Manhattan [...]

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A news executive has a plan to start charging for online news. The Financial Times editor, Lionel Barber, has predicted that “almost all” news organisations will be charging for online content within a year. Barber said building online platforms that could charge readers on an article-by-article or [...]

Danny Glover reports on President Obama’s total restructuring of the White House message machine in a piece ominously titled “The Cost of Controlling The Press.” Barack Obama’s White House is spending more than $80,000 a week to staff its old and new media offices. Add the price of speechwriters and the White House communications tab [...]

My “Obama Wants Indefinite Detention Power” post was based on a widely-cited WaPo piece by Dafna Linzer and Peter Finn. I didn’t want to derail the discussion there with a sidebar but there’s an odd journalism angle here.  The authors are bylined as “ProPublica and Washington Post Staff Writer,” respectively. There’s a graphic box further [...]

Quite a kerfuffle has broken out in the blogs and on Twitter over President Obama’s calling on HuffPo’s Nico Pitney to ask a pre-screened question in yesterday’s press conference.  Politico’s Michael Calderone broke the story: In what appeared to be a coordinated exchange, President Obama called on the Huffington Post’s Nico Pitney near the start [...]

Jeff Jarvis notes that there has been some controversy over Google’s Streetview, which allows people to see videos of what’s going on in the streets, including residential neighborhoods, in an ever-expanding number of locations. In a few countries around the world, we’ve seen a backlash against Google’s Streetview as somehow an invasion of privacy, even [...]

Here we go again:  The government is looking to get into the business of regulating blogs, reports AP’s Deborah Yao. Savvy consumers often go online for independent consumer reviews of products and services, scouring through comments from everyday Joes and Janes to help them find a gem or shun a lemon. What some fail to [...]

The erstwhile Dr. Leopold Stotch passes along news of the exploits of a fellow Irish prankster: When Dublin university student Shane Fitzgerald posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia, he said he was testing how our globalized, increasingly Internet-dependent media was upholding accuracy and accountability in an age of instant news. His report card: [...]

Jim Romenesko summarizes a CJR editorial: Walter Pincus points out that the Washington Post won nineteen Pulitzers in the last decade, but lost more than 120,000 readers in that time. “Why? My answer, unpopular among my colleagues, is that while many of these longer efforts were worthwhile, they took up space and resources that could [...]

Michael Scherer had an epiphany yesterday searching for a transcript of Dick Cheney’s CNN interview and stumbling on nine different stories in Politico about it. What struck me about all this was not just that Politico had created a hassle for me, the reader. It was that they were doing news online smarter than the [...]

Justin Fox gets it just right on the current flap between Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart and CNBC’s Jim Cramer: Even with the best of intentions, you can’t be on the air live for 17 hours a day and only broadcast intelligent things. And CNBC’s intention is not to do good, but to get as many [...]

Via Taegan Goddard, I see that Harry Jaffe is proclaiming an age of fluff in the newspaper business. Today’s news is there is no news on the front page of today’s Washington Post. Not one of the six articles on  page A1 begins with a hard news lead that imparts real news to readers. Welcome [...]

Mark Dillen‘s precis of recent developments in the news media is staggering: The news out of Philadelphia is that there is no news — no newspapers, that is. The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News have joined the swelling ranks of American print media that have gone bankrupt. Last month, it was the Star [...]

The Old Gray Lady has another of the epic scoops that made them the Newspaper of Record. Ace correspondent Helene Cooper breaks the news in a piece of journalism titled “For Young President, Flecks of Gray.” Well, that didn’t take long. Just 44 days into the job, and President Obama is going gray. It happens [...]

Paul Harvey, one of the pioneers of broadcast journalism, has died, aged 90. Known for his deliberate delivery and pregnant pauses, Harvey’s broadcasts were heard on more than 1,200 radio stations and 400 Armed Forces networks and his commentaries appeared in 300 newspapers, according to his Web site. He had been hosting his radio shows [...]

Kate McMillan is amused at the AP’s fawning reports on President Obama’s non-State of the Union speech and especially by the fact that they were written before said speech was actually given. The practice of writing up reports based on prepared remarks is hardly new, of course, but it is rather odd.   The general practice [...]

Tom Barnett‘s latest book tour has him frustrated with much of the mainstream press, whose preference for cuteness and brevity makes discussion of complex ideas next to impossible.  He contrasts this with talk radio, where he can have a long back-and-forth.  He closes: Long story short: after a day of many disappointing feedbacks from the [...]

Via Memeorandum, I see that MRC is hammering ABC on a story that I somehow missed: Media Research Center MRC President L. Brent Bozell, III has written a letter to ABC News President David Westin calling on him to publicly address and resolve what appears to be a clear violation of journalistic ethics by ABC’s [...]

There’s an article over at Reuters listing some of the possible scenarios that might emerge in the confrontation between India and Pakistan. I think the article is best described as an editorial. A mixture of opinion and superficial analysis, if it had a by-line it would be an op-ed. It’s not a news article since [...]

Deborah Howell, WaPo’s outgoing ombudsman, laments the downside of her profession becoming more professionalized. Journalism is better than it was in my early days, and changes in technology have opened up a new world. My worry is that journalists aren’t as connected to readers as they were in the days of my youth, when the [...]

Andrew Sullivan, who was editor-in-chief of The New Republic when he was 12 and now works at The Atlantic, notes that the websites of conservative opinion magazines National Review and The Weekly Standard get no more traffic than the top conservative blogs. So the competition for the opinion-reader is intense. And the financial edge of [...]

In the clip from Fox News about staff infighting that’s embedded in James’ post below, a lot of people around the blogosphere are making hay of the fact that the report claims that Sarah Palin did not realize that Africa was a continent, not a country. To which I say: do you really believe that? [...]

A new Pew study on the media habits of the American people finds that people who rely on a combination of traditional news sources and the Internet are smarter and more affluent than those who rely on either alone and, not surprisingly, “spend more time with the news on a typical day.” What’s people’s favorite [...]

Responding to Nicholas Kristof‘s concern that “Only four American newspapers now have foreign desks,” Matt Yglesias observes, How many foreign desks was a typical American actually able to read back in 1978? For most people, I think, the answer was one or two. Today only four American papers maintain a foreign desk but it’s easy [...]