Shame, people power and corruption

Reblogged from mohamed el dahshan. economist, writer, speaker, compulsive traveller.:

In preparation for the World Economic Forum in Davos which I attended last week, I was asked to share some thoughts on transparency and growth. This is my blog post on the subject.

In the 1990s, Uganda suffered from a problem of corruption so severe that, for every 100 dollars the government would disburse to schools across the country, only 20 would reach the destination; 80 dollars would somehow disappear, siphoned along the way.

Read more… 483 more words

Mohamed el Dahshan is a compelling blogger, living through the transformation of Egypt from a dictatorship to . . . something else. el Dahshan is capturing, with sharp insight and equally sharp writing, the anguish of young, liberal Egyptians as the new, democratically elected regime provides ever-more evidence that it wants to control Egypt with the same iron rule as the former, dictatorial regime. His message about the power of transparency ought to resonate deeply in our own, supposedly open, societies. el Dahshan is fighting for a society that we take for granted. Never take it for granted.

Kill it or keep it

We are now witnessing the climactic, if not final, chapter in the story of print: Kill it vs. Keep it. Feeding tube in or out. Short term with print, or long term without it. It’s not a new discussion; the demise of print has long been foretold. There is now, however, meaningful  evidence of publishers placing their final bets.

Kill it:

Exhibit A, of course, is Advance Publications, which in 2009 cut back the printing of its Ann Arbor News to two days per week. Earlier this year, Advance reduced its flagship New Orleans Times-Picayune to three days, did the same to its three papers in Alabama, and announced it’ll do likewise at its Harrisburg, Pa., Patriot-News and Syracuse, N.Y., Post-Standard. All signs point to a similar move in 2013 at Advance’s Cleveland Plain Dealer, and the betting window is open at the Oregonian in Portland.

“If you look at the trend lines for print, seven-day-a-week American newspaper journalism, it’s hard to project a long-term future for that.”

Nola.com Editor James O’Byrne

We all realize that, at some point, daily print will go away. Is Advance simply ahead of the pack in leading the way, or has it taken a terrible misstep?

Ken Doctor

Publishers who have followed suit, either reducing print frequency or abandoning ink and paper entirely, range from the Oregon Daily Herald, a college paper; to The Sporting News (a monument to the romance of print if ever there was one); to Newsweek; to Postmedia’s string of Canadian dailies. Even for one New York weekly, printing one day a week is too much.

Though he has no chips of his own in the print game, Netscape founder Marc Andreessen says the New York Times should abandon print.

Keep it:

The biggest white knight is Warren Buffett, who bought a bushel of local papers earlier this year and proclaimed he’s bullish on the printed newspaper.

Boston investor Aaron Kushner bought the remnants of Freedom Communications this year to claim its jewel, the Orange County Register, and promptly went on a spending spree, hiring dozens of journalists and adding pages to the paper. The Register, populated by some very good journalists whom I admire, is a newspaper time machine, an actual, living newsroom circa 1999.

“I’ve always felt that newspapers were important and valuable”

Aaron Kushner

Kushner quickly spun off the Colorado Springs Gazette, my alma mater and a pickup in his purchase of the Register, to Clarity Media, one of the many enterprises orbiting Denver’s Phil Anschutz. The Clarity game plan: cautiously rebuild the newsroom, and restore section fronts and pages to a print edition that had been thinned out by the pre-Kushner ownership.

You might include the Baton Rouge Advocate in this group because of its push into New Orleans to scoop up former Times-Picayune subscribers, but it strikes me as a market-share play, not a baseline decision on the sustainability of printed news. And who knows what big spender Doug Manchester really thinks about the future of the printed newspaper beyond its ability to advance his interests.

There will be continued investment in newspapers in 2013, when Tribune Co. properties emerge from Chapter 11 and go up for auction. Kushner has said he’ll sniff the Los Angeles Times prospectus, and Buffett presumably will look over some of Tribune’s smaller, local titles. Money will change hands in 2013; but the longer-term plans for former Tribune newspapers — retreat from print, or double down on it — aren’t known yet.

Likely there will be winners and losers among both the kill-it and keep-it players. Some of the keepers will add online paywalls. I keep waiting for Digital First Media to join the killers even as they keep their websites free to users, in defiance of the paywall proliferation everywhere else. (UPDATE: DFM joins the killers, partly, by announcing on Jan. 16 it will cut back printing of its Oneida (N.Y.) Daily Dispatch to three days per week).  Everyone is trying everything, all at once.

But two distinct camps, with fundamentally different views of the long-term viability of the printed newspaper, finally are emerging. Let’s see what happens when the results start to come in.

AFFIRMATION, Jan. 31: The always-interesting Ken Doctor does the numbers nicely on Kushner and the Orange County Register over at the Nieman Journalism Lab, and comes to a similar conclusion: “We have the Advance labs and the Register labs.”

Newspaper image: Flickr/Karen Mardahl;used under Creative Commons license

This is not necessarily a bad thing

A Virginia business owner is suing a woman for 750 large for posting on Yelp her scathing review of the remodeling work he had done at her home. She called the work shoddy, which is merely her opinion, and her right to express. But she also made up stuff. Stuff that implies the businessman stole jewelry from her home. Stuff that’s outside the realm of opinion. Libelous stuff. Stuff that comes right out of a Journalism 101 textbook chapter titled “Don’t Do This.”

In her Yelp post, the customer said she was the only one with the house key when the jewelry disappeared.

That’s not good enough to go to print or post, as any qualified reporter or editor knows. Nor has the contractor been charged with any crime. So far, the judge has ordered the woman to take down the parts about theft.

The judge also told her to take down her assertion that she had prevailed in a lawsuit the contractor previously had filed against her. Turns out the two had settled. That’s called fudging the facts, and it’s a no-no.

In this blog-enabled age, anyone can be a journalist. Anyone can share their observations of the world with the world. But if one is going to swim with the journalists, one must account to the same rules that apply to journalists. Rules such as those that govern libel and slander.

Journalists know that you don’t even hint someone is even merely an alleged thief, or an embezzler, a predator or something equally criminal unless you’ve got the goods: a criminal complaint, a police affidavit, or the on-the-record statement of someone in proper authority to make such a charge. This is not difficult to learn, by any means, but it is an essential practice if one is to make a living — or prevent a lawsuit — publishing information about other people.

The woman’s attorney is quoted as saying the judge’s action “appears to be a very chilling result in terms of speech.” No. There’s no chilling the truth. Stick to the truth, and you’ll have no problems.

It’s a pro-am publishing world. The amateurs will learn just how careful with information any pro publisher must be. And if, because of smackdowns like this one, they gain a little more appreciation for the work of journalists, so much the better.

There’s no need to sugar-coat it

To hear Doug Manchester tell it, he slayed some kind of dragon out there on the plains of Mordor in order to save as many jobs at the North County Times as he did.

Manchester, who bought the San Diego Union-Tribune (now U-T San Diego) in December, this week closed his purchase of the NCT, in northern San Diego County, from Lee Enterprises. As a result, the new owner will lay off 80 people in the combined company, most of them at the NCT, including 24 in the newsroom, a full third of NCT’s journalists.

“The fact is our obvious areas of duplication will yield some cutbacks,” Manchester told the NCT. “We are going to try to keep as many as possible but it’s inevitable there will be some consolidation. We have been able to keep the total amount of layoffs to under 100 employees.”

Manchester makes it sound as if the merger were a hurricane, a force of nature out of his control, and the only thing he could do was board up the windows to prevent greater damage. When the storm cleared, whew! Only 80 jobs lost.

Hey, anyone who invests in a local news company has my endorsement. Better a consolidated operation if the alternative is no operation at all. By all accounts, there is decent severance. All the right things, considering.

But let’s be clear: This merger didn’t happen to Manchester. He made it happen. He either made the offer, or accepted the offer, with the intent of shedding as much cost as possible without harming revenue or the expanded market share. That’s the whole idea behind mergers. He didn’t prevent cuts from being made; he made as many cuts as he safely could.

His statement would have a ring of believability if the NCT needed the merger in order to survive. Diminished as it is, it has remained cash-flow positive, if only barely.

Maybe he was just trying not to sound heartless. That’s commendable. But the result is something that sounds disingenuous.

Not helping

Innocent Americans, and just about any Christian (because to the mob, Christian = western = American = evil) abroad now must run for their lives, thanks to some knothead who thinks the way to bring about justice in the world is to jam a red-hot poker into the eye of Muslims:

Anti-Islam filmmaker in hiding after protests

An honest examination of Islam, or any religion, is one thing. Overt provocation is another. Only the killers, and not the film, are responsible for causing the deaths of four Americans so far. But the fact that the filmmaker is currently in hiding is all the evidence you need to conclude that he, more than anyone, understands that free speech has consequences.

UPDATE: The film trailer has been avilable online for several weeks, raising the question: why did this happen Tuesday? Tuesday, as in: Sept. 11. American officials have begun to examine whether the mob attacks were sparked internally, by jihadist elements using the film as a handy trigger. It would change the facts of the argument, but not the conclusion: needless provocation helps enemies whip fanatics into a murderous froth.

. . . and now, The Atlantic reports on how the movie trailer may not be attached to a movie at all. And how the name of the person who took to hiding may not be a real name, and . . . basically, how this piece of You Tube hate could be a ham-handed ruse. The deadly effects, however, are anything but fake, and the mere existence of this lamentable example of free speech has played directly into the hands of those who would like to wipe us out.

Twitter, you tease

Huh. In 2007, your local newspaper website simply had to embrace Twitter or risk irrelevance. Now it’s Twitter that’s acting like the iron-fisted information monolith, and news orgs that look like forward-thinking, digital-first, socially networked platforms of the future.

Via Reporter.net:

[Twitter's] stricter guidelines on the use of tweets go against the trend towards more inclusive, open and networked forms of journalism.

Newspapers can’t win for losing. They get criticized for not having the vision to invent social media, then get punished when they actually use it.

So much so wrong, on so many different levels

1. Public information celebrated as public — but the public can’t see it

2. A press secretary who doesn’t respond to the press

3. A communications director who then chides a reporter for not following procedure

See the dismaying story here: Sun reporter barred from City Hall while seeking CitiStat reports – Baltimore Sun