Giving In To Temptation

South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s disclosure that his disappearance over the last few days had more to do with an Argentinean lover than a love of hiking on the Appalachian Trail puts him squarely in a current bipartisan gallery of American politicians with a deer-in-the-headlights moment.

Sanford is a Republican. So is Louisiana Sen. David Vitter, found on the client list of the so-called “DC Madam.” So is Nevada Sen. John Ensign who just said he had an affair with a campaign staffer.

Democrats have New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer patronizing prostitutes and former presidential candidate John Edwards with a campaign videographer.

But what we all have is an ever-growing addiction to Voyeur Journalism. The Sanford story was the hot item on the web and everywhere else Wednesday night, including his teary press conference video.

That Sanford was incommunicado for days after having left his staff with misleading information is a legitimate public question and subject of reporting. That he now says he was in Argentina with a mistress during that time is relevant, but only to the extent that it proves he misled his staff and the people of South Carolina and wasn’t available to perform the duties of his office.

The rest?

The State, the largest newspaper in South Carolina, was on line Wednesday with quotes from e-mails between Sanford and his lover, with promises of the full exchange in Thursday’s edition. If there is a public purpose in publishing the governor’s comment on his lover’s tan lines and other attributes, I’m too stupid to see it.

That’s clearly not a problem for the New York Times, which has the tan lines quote in detail on “The Caucus, The Politics and Government Blog of The Times.”

It isn’t a problem at the Washington Post either – the story on their web site carries the same quote.

So does the online reporting of The Associated Press. So does CNN. USA Today’s web site linked to the e-mails on The State’s web site.

There are probably many, many more stories and links using the quotes. If they have a general theme, it is that Sanford, a conservative who spoke often of family values, gave in to sexual temptation.

Kind of like media outfits that once spoke often of journalism standards giving in to tabloid temptation. But don’t expect them to report that – certain things are beyond the public’s need to know.

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Weekend Tids and Bits

Governor Go Go Is Right for a change in a way not connected with the political spectrum. Alaska’s Governor Sarah Palin visited New York City and went to a Yankees game with her 14-year-old daughter Willow, prompting CBS Late Show host David Letterman to make a joke about Willow getting “knocked up by Alex Rodriguez.” The governor snarled and Letterman offered a half-hearted, half-baked apology that boiled down to saying he meant to insult Bristol, Palin’s 18-year-old single-Mom daughter. That’s supposed to make it better? With Palin herself working so hard to keep comedy writers across the nation busy, her kids should be left alone. Those who want to follow the result of John McCain yielding to the Dementia Side of The Force should bookmark Anchorage Daily News’s politics reporting at http://www.adn.com/politics/ and take a look at http://www.adn.com/sarah-palin/.

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Saudi Arabia’s Tentative Steps to the Twelfth Century continued in June with the showing of a movie in Riyadh, the first such wild and crazy behavior in more than three decades. No women allowed of course, and no girls over the age of 10. Still, conservatives in the kingdom demonstrated against the obvious slide to decadence that could lead to –gasp! – mixing of the sexes. Contact between unmarried men and women is very strictly prohibited in the oil-rich kingdom. No wonder those camels always look nervous.

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Newspapers keep “preparedness” obits on hand so that when some notable sounds a final note, the obit is ready for quick updating and publication. Now that newspapers themselves are stumbling towards the Last Checkout counter, whoever will do the obit should ponder this tidbit: only about an average 14 percent of a paper’s operating budget goes to produce content. The rest is gobbled by printing, delivery and the suits who supervise. Look for more and a link at: http://news-cycle.blogspot.com/2009/06/moody-analyst-newspapers-cost-structure.html a page in the News Cycle blog.

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Magazine covers shouting doom are hardly new and not limited to Time Magazine, but the venerable news weekly has had some doozies. They’re neatly presented at Reason Online, the web presence of Reason Magazine. Look at http://reason.com/news/show/134038.html and enjoy the yucks that 20-20 hindsight makes possible. And enjoy it while it lasts, because if daily new publications are keeling over, weekly news publications shouldn’t be making long-term plans.

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Here’s a look at what we discussed this week:

n Monday we talked about child care tips for fathers that are very unlikely to come from mothers (or allowed to continue once discovered). http://larryblaskosaid.blogspot.com/2009/06/fathering-tips-fathers-day-is-less-than.html

n Tuesday was a ho-hum day talking about Supreme Court nominee Sotomayor’s broken ankle and Alaska’s Governor Go Go being accused of plagiarizing Newt Gingrich. http://larryblaskosaid.blogspot.com/2009/06/news-is-busting-out-all-over-actually.html

n Wednesday was Federal Follies day as we follow our government’s relentless attempts to drive common sense out of the public arena. http://larryblaskosaid.blogspot.com/2009/06/federal-follies-current-edition-tuesday.html

n Thursday’s topic explored free speech issues that develop when an employee says unkind things about a customer and an employer raps knuckles, Not a real sexy issue, but an important one if you’ve ever told your Facebook buddies that your boss needs the front half of a horse for a complete life. http://larryblaskosaid.blogspot.com/2009/06/mind-your-mother-revisited-seems-like.html

n Friday covered the strange turn of events in Washington, where things are actually getting done. http://larryblaskosaid.blogspot.com/2009/06/strange-washington-signals-things.html

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Mind Your Mother Revisited

Seems like Richard Richtmyer might want to rethink his Facebook friends while the rest of us rethink how public or private social networking forums really are and whether employers may discipline employees over postings.

Richtmyer, a newsman for The Associated Press, commented on Facebook about the executive management of McClatchy Newspapers, saying, according to a wired.com article, that “It seems like the ones who orchestrated the whole mess should be losing their jobs or getting pushed into smaller quarters.”

That was a reference to the woes at McClatchy, whose stock price has been wearing lead water wings since acquiring Knight-Ridder in time for The Great Newspaper Recession. The Facebook comment drew a reprimand from Mother AP, apparently tipped by one of Richtmyer’s “friends.”

The AP’s ethics policy is pretty clear: “Anyone who works for the AP must be mindful that opinions they express may damage the AP's reputation as an unbiased source of news. They must refrain from declaring their views on contentious public issues in any public forum, whether in Web logs, chat rooms, letters to the editor, petitions, bumper stickers or lapel buttons, and must not take part in demonstrations in support of causes or movements.”

The policy itself may be the last clear thing in sight for a while.

The News Media Guild, which represents AP employees, says on its web site that it has “has asked The Associated Press to provide copies of all its written communications with staff regarding Facebook postings and a copy of all the written reprimands given to employees since Jan. 1, 2009, because of comments made on Facebook.”

The Guild on its website mentions the National Labor Relations Act, which allows employees to discuss job-related things. McClatchy’s troubles are part of troubles in the news industry at large, and McClatchy is an AP member, so are comments about that job-related? The Guild’s web site explains that “Switching from job or labor issues to general attacks on the company's or a members' product, unrelated to any labor dispute, could fall outside the realm of protected speech under the act.”

So is it acceptable to say “the company (any company) made bonehead moves and that’s why we’re having layoffs,” but not acceptable to simply say “the company (any company) made bonehead moves because its leaders are boneheads?”

The flap also raises issues about how public Facebook postings are. Are they postings in “any public forum” as mentioned in the AP policy? Or is it just a password/privilege-controlled private discussion among friends? How many friends participating in a “private discussion among friends” turn it into a de facto public discussion?

These questions go far beyond the AP/Guild/Facebook kerfuffle and have their echoes in discipline and terminations in other industries that started when an employee said something their employer didn’t like. The online world, where employee and employer have digital megaphones of potentially equal volume, just highlights the issues.

Curious about how this will all sort out? Start with the assumption that all parties here are attempting to do the right thing, and start following the web discussions. Here are a few urls:

n http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/06/facebooksword/

n http://newsmediaguild.org/newsroom/guild_news/guild_presses_facebook_posting_reprimands

n http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090609/1837405183.shtml#comments

n http://gawker.com/5285261/ap-spanks-reporter-for-patently-true-facebook-post

n If the AP addresses this issue in a general press release, try looking for it here: http://www.ap.org/pages/about/pressreleases/preleaseindex.html

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Reporting Well Is The Best Revenge

 

Leaders of supposedly competitive businesses who get together and discuss things tempt both fate and the federal anti-trust laws, especially if the discussion is about prices. And if they lead big enough companies with high public profiles, they can probably count on having five business reporters for every meeting invitee.

 

Unless, of course, they’re the titans who employ most of the reporters. Then they can simply not say anything and feel safe from the glare of the media spotlights they own and control.

 

That must have been the reasoning as a couple of dozen certified media hotshots fluttered into the O’Hare Hilton Thursday for a discreet Newspaper Association of America-prompted discussion sanitarily titled “Models To Lawfully Monetize Content.” The discussion among most major U.S. newspaper publishers was so lawful, in fact, the NAA would later say it took place “with anti-trust counsel present.”

 

That’s reminiscent of a couple of young Alaskans who said they used protection, but anyway, the hush-hush meeting’s agenda was said to have an 8:10 a.m. kickoff.

 

James Warren had it on The Atlantic’s web site at 8:31.

 

In detail. With names of individuals and the companies they represented, the topics to be discussed and Warren’s take on the day, including the full disclosure that as a former managing editor and Washington bureau chief of The Chicago Tribune:

 

 “At the behest of new corporate superiors (yes, some from radio), I helped oversee the painful layoffs of about 100 in the Chicago Tribune newsroom last year, before being dispatched by someone the Marlon Brando character in ‘Apocalypse Now’ might characterize as ‘an errand boy sent by grocery clerks to collect the bill.’”

 

A less-sanitized title of the NAA’s meeting might have been “We’re All Bleeding Ad Dollars, So How Do We Start Making A Buck From The Content We’ve Been Giving way For Free?” And a person without a trusting soul might speculate that on the advice of counsel, all the participants were thinking individually, by coincidence and without collusion that “if we all stick together, here we might pull this off.”

 

But that’s speculation.

 

What isn’t speculation is that Warren’s reporting found its way into the online worlds of Editor & Publisher, Poynter Online’s Romenesko, Harvard’s Neiman Journalism Lab, Politico, Slate, The Huffington Post, Gawker, MediaWeek, mediabistro.com and elsewhere. The story even made the AP’s news report, which dutifully mentioned that AP CEO Tom Curley had been at the meeting.

 

You remember reporting. It used to be done in newspapers, and some of it still is.

 

But as James Warren just demonstrated, including to a couple of dozen media moguls who shouldn’t have needed the lesson, reporting doesn’t depend on newspapers. Newspapers, especially ones seeking to replacer ad dollars with content dollars, might hope to depend on reporting.

 

You know, reporting from the folks who’ve been let go by the thousands, or had their salaries and benefits slashed to keep up debt payments or stock prices for the bonus babies at the helm.

 

So here’s hoping reporters will continue to report, but not in newspapers – reporting well is the best revenge.

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See Warren’s Atlantic piece at: http://correspondents.theatlantic.com/james_warren/2009/05/shhhh_newspaper_publishers_are_quietly_holding_a_very_very_important_conclave_today_will_you_soon_be.php

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