While sitting under yet another a CNN Airport Channel monitor the other day, I listened to Lou Dobbs on one of his rants against illegal immigrants, which surely everyone knows is code language for Mexicans. As I listened to him exploit xenophobia for ratings points and book sales, I thought about Hitler.
But I decided I would not cross the line drawn by Godwin's Law. Not going there.
I was stuck in an airport lounge Saturday morning, sitting in Lubbock, Texas, waiting for the fog to clear in Houston so I could go home. The TV was babbling away. It was CNN's airport channel. I have no idea what happened in Iraq, because CNN didn't see fit to tell me what was going on. I heard two things, repeated over and over: CNN is the most trusted name in journalism (promo, with booming voice and imposing music). And Alec Baldwin yelling at his daughter on the phone.
Morris has several interesting openings right now:
New media directors at several newspapers ranging from the Florida Times-Union to little Pittsburg, Kansas. The job is opening up any day now at Bluffton Today. A new media director has a tough job, like a publisher, integrating revenue, audience, journalism and public service issues, and serving as a key management team member.
In a comment, Tish Grier observes that Wall Street needs to get out and talk with real people. She's right, but so do newspapers. I just got back from several days in a local market where a team of Medill students did exactly that, interviewing hundreds of regular people -- women, youth, small business folks and so forth -- as part of a project building on the NewspaperNext Blueprint for Transformation. It's exciting stuff, and I look forward to being able to say more about it later.
If you agree that TV news has more in common with professional "wrestling" than journalism, you'll enjoy this from the folks at Jib Jab:
The problem with Tim Porter's blog is that he doesn't write often enough. That's probably because he's been busy finishing up his book, "News, Improved: How America's Newsrooms Are Learning to Change," written with Michele McLellan. I preordered my copy today (it's published April 1) and took note of his return to the keyboard with "The Real Heroes of Newspapers," in which he takes a shot at a couple of high-profile quitters.
Project for Excellence in Journalism has released its report, "The State of the News Media 2007," and I'd really like to read it before commenting on it. Unfortunately I didn't make it past the first page of the 38-page executive summary before stumbling over this sentence:
For some, the new brand is what Wall Street calls “hyper localism” (consider the end of foreign bureaus at the Boston Globe or the narrowing of the coverage area at the Atlanta Journal Constitution).
