Thomas Friedman's lucrative "misunderstanding"

About that $75,000 speaking fee Thomas Friedman received for a speech before the [San Francisco]  Bay Area Air Quality Management District: He gave it back.

You can thank L.A. Times reporter James Rainey for pursuing Friedman to ask if he felt any guilt about accepting a significant amount of money from a public agency:

Friedman didn’t return my calls, and New York Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis seemed pretty cool to my questions. I got the feeling, from her long silences, that she thought my questions were a little silly.

Then late Tuesday afternoon, Mathis called to say Friedman would return the $75,000. She said there had been “a misunderstanding.”

Times ethics guidelines allow staffers to take speaking fees only from “educational and other nonprofit groups for which lobbying and political activity are not a major focus.” The Bay Area Air Quality Management District, which coughed up Friedman’s standard fee, hardly fits that bill.

Poynter Institute weighs in on St. Pete Times' Mug Shots

Nieman Journalism Lab interviewed Poynter Institute’s Al Tompkins for his take on the St. Petersburg Times‘ Mug Shots website. Poynter, in case you didn’t know, owns the Times. Tompkins was critical of the site and brought up some pertinent ethical issues:

I think there’s some serious concerns this kind of coverage raises … How do you make it right for those who are found to be not guilty? … Maybe we don’t have an obligation, but I think we do.

Tompkins explained that he isn’t opposed to posting an individual’s mug shot. However:

I just want to make sure there’s a reason to post it, and not just do it because we can. That’s never a good reason to put something on the Web, just because we can.

Poynter also has archived Thursday’s chat on the ethics of posting mug shots online. Matt Waite, one of the developers of the Mug Shots site, explained to Poynter’s ethics faculty Kelly McBride its function as journalism:

The main journalistic purpose of this feature is that we’ve given transparency to the grinding wheels of the justice system. The jail population is no longer an abstraction. You can look at them, as they come in. These people are your neighbors. The jail, the deputies that run it, the courts that have to deal with these folks, you pay for it. So there is a purpose to showing that to people. I would also add that people have said they found great value in being able to look at people who said they lived in a specific ZIP code because they only know their neighbors by sight.

St. Pete Times is ready for your close-up

A day after St. Petersburg Times media critic Eric Deggans wrote about monetizing the paper’s new Mug Shots site (and joked about selling photo prints of those booked as one option), I went to the Times‘ homepage and found this:

It was probably unintentional (the ads rotate), but still rather amusing that just below the Mug Shots ad on the right is a link to the Times‘ photo store.

At Out in Left Field, local blogger Catherine Durkin Robinson is not amused by what she sees as the Times‘ crass exploitation:

Surf the Web anonymously

That’s what Pirate Bay’s IPREDator promises, so you can stay one step ahead of The Man:

With IPREDator’s VPN, you can stay anonymous on the net. Your internet traffic will be encrypted and protected – even beyond what a typical VPN offers. This way, law enforcement can’t catch you when you download the latest episode of your favorite TV show…or when you get involved in other criminal activity, for that matter.

Which means some smarty-pants is going to invent the IPREDator PREDATOR and spoil all the fun. Don’t do it, man! I just want to watch this working print of Wolverine — sonofa…

PBS ombudsman responds to complaints

PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler responds to viewer complaints about its member stations’ pledge-drive programming. A particular target of scorn is The UltraMind Solution, featuring Dr. Mark Hyman. Getler writes:

I do think that PBS and the member stations are failing to fulfill an obligation to viewers to make absolutely clear — in unmistakable ways either visually on screen or spoken — that these are not PBS programs, that PBS does not vet them or distribute them. This would seem pretty easy to do, and pretty obvious when it would seem necessary. …

… Whatever the values or flaws of these programs, when they appear on local PBS-member stations, along with the other accompanying material I just cited, viewers have a right to be told that this does not mean it has some PBS seal of approval that conveys the kind of confidence in content that PBS seeks to insure and promote.

So if this is the case, why are programs such as Hyman’s being used to drum-up pledge support instead of programming that PBS has vetted and stands behind, per its own Standard and Policies?

Break these blog rules, journalists

Once again, Save the Media‘s Gina Chen is lighting the way for reporters who want to thrive in the digital age.

This time, she covers “10 journalism rules you can break on your blog.” My favorite is number 2:

Tell part of the story: Journalists are trained to wait until they have the full story before telling any of it. I’m not asserting that blogs shouldn’t be accurate; they should. But they should be immediate even if that means telling only the story as you know it at that moment in time. The beauty of a blog is you can update immediately as more details become apparent or earlier reports are disputed. This isn’t publishing lies; this is giving readers evolving information in real time.

Was the coverage of Natasha Richardson too much?

Writing about the late Natasha Richardson, Michael White lays into the media for their role in cultivating what he calls a “growing mood of public sentimentality” that is “potentially more destructive [than cynicism] of the tone of public life”:

Poor Natasha Richardson died during the night. What a truly dreadful thing to happen, the result of what looked like a minor head injury anyone might have suffered on or off the ski slope.

Perhaps that’s why they led this morning’s news bulletins on her death, even on Radio 4. Fairly well-known actress from a famous dynasty, married to a film star, tragic accident etc etc. The papers duly print photos of grief-stricken family members at the hospital, photos which strike me as intrusive, heartless even. The whole packaged affair is, well, ghoulish.

Stewart/Cramer was more than a game

I have to wonder if former CNBC correspondent Mike Hegedus watched the same Jon Stewart/Jim Cramer Daily Show that I did.

Writing for the Huffington Post, Hegedus cynically focuses on Stewart’s take-down of CNBC’s Cramer as an example of posturing — just another ratings gambit:

Cramer and CNBC have never had this much publicity. And while they both come out of it with a slight odor, little is likely to change. There’s nothing like the stink of notoriety. And the same goes for Stewart — how many more folks watched his show because he had Cramer on? How much more polished is his white knight “armour” now that he’s “slain” the evil Booyah? You think that was part of the plan?

OK, Hegedus has a valid point. But by focusing on the motivations and sideshow aspect underlying the Stewart/Cramer face-off, he overlooks the salient issue. One that fellow Huff Post contributor Daniel Sinker apprehended after watching Cramer’s sit-down with Stewart:

Tom Jones calls out Steve Duemig on his missing boaters report

Tom Jones’ “Shooting from the lip” is consistently one of the best reasons to read the St. Petersburg Times Sports section. Today, Jones addressed the error made by WDAE-620 radio host Steve Duemig concerning the four missing boaters in the Gulf of Mexico:

Steve Duemig of 620-AM started his popular afternoon sports show on Monday by saying he had “a source” (whom he never named) telling him that two boaters had been found alive and another “object” was sighted in the water. Ch. 10 reported one of the other boaters was found. Citing Ch. 10, that story was picked up by 1010-AM’s J.P. Peterson and several Web sites, including the Times’ tampabay.com, which continued to do its own reporting and learned the other boaters remained missing. While certainly no malice was intended and no one meant to pass along wrong information, the bottom line is the reports by Duemig and Ch. 10 were wrong.

New York Times: Get it right before you get it first

New York Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt was a credit to his paper this past weekend when he essentially admitted that the Times screwed up in publishing anonymous quotes in a story about Caroline Kennedy’s withdrawal from consideration for the Senate seat in New York:

On Jan. 22, the day after Kennedy withdrew, [Times reporter] Hakim received one of the calls from the [Gov. David] Paterson camp, and at 2:52 p.m., an article appeared on the paper’s Web site under the headline, “Taxes and a Housekeeper Are Said to Derail Kennedy’s Bid.” It quoted the anonymous source as saying that Paterson “never had any intention of picking Kennedy because it was clear that she wasn’t ready for prime time. She had botched her rollout. She was unprepared. She clearly had no policy experience and couldn’t handle the pressure of the public stage.” The article had no more information about the tax and housekeeper problems than was in the headline.

As Hoyt explains, Times staff felt the pressure to keep up with the New York Post, which had just posted a story about Kennedy nine minutes earlier. In its haste, the Times did a disservice to Kennedy and its readers.

But Mathew Ingram, writing for Nieman Journalism Lab, saw the gaffe and subsequent reader reaction as a case of news business “evolving online in real time“:

But to me, the Kennedy story evolved exactly as many stories evolve in real-time online. … Readers complained to Hoyt within minutes of the story appearing, as did some other NYT editors, and as a result the story was broadened and more fact-checking was done.

That to me is a success.

It is indeed a positive that more fact-checking was done as a result of reader and editor complaints, and that the story was enhanced with quotes disputing the source’s account. But that doesn’t mitigate the basic cause of those complaints: that the Times had violated its own Confidential News Sources Policy:

We do not grant anonymity to people who use it as cover for a personal or partisan attack. If pejorative opinions are worth reporting and cannot be specifically attributed, they may be paraphrased or described after thorough discussion between writer and editor. The vivid language of direct quotation confers an unfair advantage on a speaker or writer who hides behind the newspaper, and turns of phrase are valueless to a reader who cannot assess the source.

Hoyt quotes Bob Steele, ethicist at Poynter Institute, who sums up the issue correctly in my opinion:

“Competitive fervor is not a justifiable ethical value.”