Weekend Tids and Bits

Gracious to the End: The Newark Star-Ledger is winning praise for the way it is handling salary cuts, kind of like cheering the headsman for a sharp axe and good follow-through.

For the record, the cuts go on a progressive scale --  five percent of the first $40,000, ten percent of the next $40,000 and 15 percent beyond that. This comes after bigtime buyouts, mandatory ten-day unpaid leave, and no more pension plan contributions. Plus, employees will be picking up a quarter of their health plan costs, taking another $80.11 a week from employees on the family plan.

My hometown paper for more than three decades, the Ledger has that thin, wasting look you usually see not long before the end.

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TANJ! (There Ain’t No Justice):  The United States Department of Justice say’s it will save $6.7 million over the next five years by moving legal notices about property forfeiture from newspapers to http://forfeiture.gov. That’s probably only the beginning across, federal, state and local governments and is just one more nail in a newspapering coffin already having more nails than wood.

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You Can Flu Some of the People All of The Time. . . Media outlets and authorities fond of seeing themselves mentioned completed the Swine Flu (Sorry Mr. President, H1N1 virus) cycle last week, moving from Prepare For The End to a much milder Prepare For The End (but it’s not coming for the forseeable future). The good: countries got to practice the drill they’ll need for a major threat. The bad: over-reaction, especially in Mexico, that caused far more economic damage than it prevented disease. The silly: Afghanistan taking the sole pig in the Muslim Country’s zoo off exhibition and into quarantine, lest it infect the faithful who have more to worry about with their bullet epidemic than a possible virus.

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JP Morgan Chase was one of the financial institutions that passed the government stress test. That’s probably because of the conservative financial policies found at the branch, where I tried to pay for a Mothers Day Visa gift card with a Chase Visa debit card. Sorry, the kind teller said, only checks or cash are accepted.

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When Pigs Report

 

It ain’t as easy as it looks.

 

Those who think the impending death of newspapers means we no longer need journalism tend to think any citizen can get whatever information is needed from the web. And it’s true – you can get all sorts of information from the web with just a few clicks.

 

But whether or not that information is accurate, organized or even needed is something else. Consider the current Swine Flu Festival, being conducted across the web because today is Friday, and except for the occasional disaster, not a lot happens on Fridays.

 

Start with The Drudge Report, the web’s supermarket tabloid on steroids. It’s main story screams “Outbreak” and the kickers over a picture of pigs calmly report:

 

“MEXICO CONFIRMS 16 DEAD; 50 MORE DEATHS BEING PROBED...

Travelers warned of mysterious respiratory illness...

Mexico City launches huge vaccination campaign...

7 hit by strange new swine flu in USA...

Heighten Risk of Pandemic...

Concern in Texas...

Mutated from pigs, transmitted to humans...”

 

Now flu of any sort is nasty stuff. The World Health Organization (WHO), with its customary flair for finely tuned estimates, says flu kills 250,000-500,000 persons annually. So this is really serious and threatening news, right?

 

They think so at AFP (Agence France Press), where around noon they were counting 16 swine flu deaths, with Mexico “probing 50 more.” That must be French conservatism, because 14 hours earlier, CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) had 20 dead and 137 infected.

 

Reuters, the financial information firm with a news hobby, reported in the early afternoon today that “A deadly strain of swine flu never seen before has killed as many as 61 people.” They got to 61 bodies by taking the 16 dead announced by Mexican authorities and tossing in 45 more that “may” have died from the disease.

 

The Associated Press struck a similar tone with “At least 16 people - and possibly dozens more” dead in Mexico from swine flu, noting that WHO was reporting 57 dead, but that it wasn’t sure from what, and dutifully saying far down in the story that only 16 had been confirmed by Mexican authorities as being from swine flu.

 

Bloomberg has been taking the most cautious approach, saying “Disease trackers are asking U.S. hospitals to help follow a new strain of swine flu and are trying to determine whether it’s related to hundreds of illnesses and 57 deaths in Mexico.”

 

And The New York Times handled it in a one-paragraph item citing the WHO figure of 57, and a much longer and more explanatory story on the seven U.S. cases, all of whom have recovered.

 

Now anyone with a web browser and a lot of time can read all this stuff and sort it out, and call the sources with questions, and decide what is fact, what is speculation, and what is some health bureaucrat enjoying his or her time in the media spotlight. But most of us don’t have that kind of time or the required skills.

 

Instead, we depend on folks called journalists. And when the last newspaper has shuffled off to history’s graveyard, we’ll still need journalists to sort things out and report the event, because it ain’t as easy as it looks.

 

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