Category: The Media

Do Journalists Conference Too Much about Journalism?

by Craig Fehrman, posted in All History is Local History, The Media

[New Haven Advocate]

It’s shaping up to be a busy (and alt-weekly-ish) day around here. In this week’s New Haven Advocate, I’ve got a short piece that previews this weekend’s big journalism conference at Yale. (Full program here [.pdf].) The conference lineup looks great, but it also looks a lot like the one that presided at Harvard just two weeks ago, and in my preview I speculate on whether we’ve reached some kind of metamedia tipping point.

I realize there’s an easy irony here, what with me only adding to the oversaturation, but there’s also a larger context I couldn’t really get to in the paper. Yale’s conference is being funded by the school’s Knight Law and Media program, which is itself funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. One of the conference’s speakers is Paul Bass, who edits the hyperlocal New Haven Independent. Bass’s site now has six full-time and six part-time reporters, and together they break more stories than the New Haven Register. Bass keeps innovating, too: in June he launched a second spinoff, the Valley-Independent Sentinel, with a $500,000 grant from none other than the Knight Foundation.

Here are two more numbers to consider: $570,000 and $315,000. Those are the salaries, respectively, for Pro Publica editor Paul Steiger and Texas Tribune editor Evan Smith, and both organizations have received large grants from the Knight Foundation. Now, one more number: $60,000. That’s what the Chi-Town Daily News, a hyperlocal site similar to Bass’s, needed to raise in order to make it to the end of 2009, when several of its grants would have renewed. The Daily News didn’t make it, even though its previous funding sources included . . . the Knight Foundation.

My point here isn’t to highlight the pervasive generosity of the Knight Foundation (though that’s certainly a worthwhile point). Instead, it’s simply that, right now, at least, the pool of nonprofit news money remains a small one, and paying for one good thing means not paying for another.

Aggregators and the Media: Sportscenter Edition

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Sports, The Media

[Slate’s The Big Money]

One of the things I don’t understand about the Huffington Post—and there are many—is its lack of a sports page. I mean, they have one, technically, but it doesn’t make the home page’s navigation bar and seems kind of pro forma, even forgotten. If you’re willing to use sleaze to drum up page views, why not sports?

Well, here’s another way the Huffington Post might benefit from sports: over at Slate’s The Big Money, I’ve got a new piece that explores how and why, in the sports media, the relationship between aggregators and news outlets has remained sympathetic and even symbiotic.

And if you’re in the mood for more sports journalism, why not check out my Deadspin follow-up on Jericho Scott, the nine-year-old baseball player who got banned for being “too good”? It was a big story last year—big enough, even, for the Huffington Post.

Linking and Fact-checking: The New Yorker Strikes Back

by Craig Fehrman, posted in The Media

[x-posted at Splice Today]

In this week’s New Yorker, James Surowiecki has a great piece on health care. (How’s this for a lede? “There are times when Americans’ attitude toward health-care reform seems a bit like St. Augustine’s take on chastity: Give it to us, Lord, but not yet.”) It examines the current debate through two concepts: the “endowment effect” (owning something makes you overvalue it) and the “status quo bias” (people tend to prefer the, well, status quo). If there’s something vaguely Gladwellian about this, Surowiecki manages to be both original and non-strident, which is harder than it sounds when it comes to health care.

But I was struck less by Surowiecki’s content than by his form. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a story on the New Yorker‘s fabled fact-checking department and its stubborn refusal to link to sources. My main piece of evidence was Nicholson Baker’s story on the Kindle, which mentions a YouTube video but by the wrong name—a mistake easily avoided if his editors had only linked to the video in their online edition.

This is what makes Surowiecki’s column so interesting: it has links, lots of links, 15 in all, mostly to the political polls and broader scientific studies on which Surowiecki builds his argument. I can’t remember another New Yorker story doing this. I looked through Surowiecki’s archive, and, while he regularly cites statistics and other linkable data, this is his first “Financial Page” column to include links. (As opposed to his blog, which links regularly.)

It would be preposterous for me to take any credit for this shift. (And it’s a minor shift, anyway: the issue’s non-Surowiecki stories don’t link.) Still, if I bashed the New Yorker‘s staff when they blow it, I should praise them when they get it right—even if they never emailed me back.

Jericho Scott Has A Cold

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Features, Sports, The Media

[Deadspin]

Over at Deadspin, I’ve got a long feature on Jericho Scott, the 9-year-old baseball player banned for being “too good.” I wanted to explain how and why this became the worst-covered sports story of 2008, but I also wanted to track the kid down—not to interview him, which I never did, but to watch him play. He became my 9-year-old, 58-pound Moby Dick, and, when I finally found him, he was pitching for a spot in the PONY World Series.

Anyway, after almost 3,000 words, you’d think I’d be out of material. But the topic of youth baseball is just that rich. Here’s a few bullet points that didn’t make the cut.

  • First, some closure: CBC went 2-1 at the PONY World Series—very respectable, especially when you consider that, after all the rain outs, they finished up in New Haven on Monday afternoon, then boarded a 6 a.m. Tuesday flight out of LaGuardia. Caguas, a team from Puerto Rico, won the whole thing.
  • Back to the New Haven tournament. The weekend’s best game actually came in the losers’ bracket—Stratford sent it to extra innings with a bottom-of-the-sixth home run, with CBC ultimately winning 9-8. But the real fun came afterward, as I briefly mention in my piece. I didn’t see who or what instigated it, but two men testosteroned at each other until one took a verbal cheap shot at another, older man in a wheelchair. At this point, everyone began lunging, restraining, or screaming, as was their wont, and a New Haven official made a panicked call to the cops. The whole time this was going on, Mark Gambardella was calmly rechalking the field.
  • Most of my game notes (like the one above) focused on parents and coaches—and rightly so. After each game, the kids just climbed trees or played on dirt piles.  Still, from the beginning, the CBC players seemed much more tense, tearing up after every negative outcome. Is this related to the fact that CBC coaches retied their players’ shoes for them so they didn’t have to remove their batting gloves? I think so.
  • Last week, the New Haven Register ran its own one-year-later story on the Scotts, the first item I’ve found that doesn’t date from the original uproar. The story repeats the errors I describe in my piece and adds a few of its own, starting with a description of Gambardella’s “Little League all-star team.” When I mistakenly said “Little League” in our first interview, Gambardella corrected me: “We’re not Little League—we play real baseball.” The man is a municipal treasure.
  • While we’re talking about the Register: they were one of the many dead-ends in my attempt to find Jericho, which took multiple months and was much harder than I expected. In fact, Jericho’s most lasting legacy might be making it impossible for future generations to find a baseball team. (If you Google “new haven little league,” you get a bog of blog posts, but no contact info. For posterity, then, the organization’s online presence is here.) Some highlights from my quest included emailing the Scotts’ lawyer (his reply to my email read, in full, “They decided to move on and not pursue the matter”); calling the national PONY offices (someone answered as if it were a personal cell phone); and asking a New Haven school district about a principal and baseball coach (the secretary immediately started screaming, “No! No! No! He no longer works here!”).
  • Finally, if you’re in the mood for another instance of the sports media bringing a story to life only to kill it, check out my old interview with banned student sportswriter Michael Daly.

Linking and Fact-checking: Best Served Together

by Craig Fehrman, posted in The Media

[Splice Today]

Over at Splice Today, I’ve got a story on linking, fact-checking, and Nicholson Baker’s great New Yorker essay on the Kindle. Again, the point isn’t that Baker and co. made a mistake—and it’s about as small a mistake as one can make—but that the mistake would have been prevented if the New Yorker used the full power of online publishing, in addition to their normally excellent fact-checking department.

Anyway, as part of the piece, I emailed the New Yorker at their generic themail@newyorker.com address to ask about the error. My email—and, if it arrives, their response—is after the jump.

Continue reading “Linking and Fact-checking: Best Served Together” →